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CHAPTER ONE

Metallurgies

Genre, History, and the Construction of Heavy Metal

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I have been invited to try my hand at explaining heavy-metal music.

First, heavy metal is power…. —Rob Halford of Judas Priest¹

The Oxford English Dictionary traces “heavy metal” back through nearly two hundred years. In the late twentieth century, the term has two primary meanings: for chemists and metallurgists, it labels a group of elements and toxic compounds; for the rest of us, it refers to a kind of music. But these meanings are not unrelated. Even in the nineteenth century, “heavy metal” was both a technical term and a figurative, social one:

1828 Webster s.v., Heavy metal, in military affairs, signifies large guns, carrying balls of a large size, or it is applied to the balls themselves.

1882 Ogilvie s.v., Heavy metal, guns or shot of large size; hence, fig. ability, mental or bodily; power, influence; as, he is a man of heavy metal; also, a person or persons of great ability or power, mental or bodily; used generally of one who is or is to be another’s opponent in any contest; as, we had to do with heavy metal. (Colloq.)²

“Heavy metal,” in each of its parts and as a compound, evoked power and potency. A “man of heavy metal” was powerful and daunting, and the OED vividly confirms a long-standing social conflation of power and patriarchal order. The long history of “heavy metal” in the English language resonates with modern usage, even as contemporary musicians converse with the musical past in their work. “Heavy metal” is not simply a recently invented genre label; its meaning is indebted to the historical circulation of images, qualities, and metaphors, and it was applied to particular musical practices because it made social sense to do so.

“Heavy metal” now denotes a variety of musical discourses, social practices, and cultural meanings, all of which revolve around concepts, images, and experiences of power. The loudness and intensity of heavy metal music visibly empower fans, whose shouting and headbanging testify to the circulation of energy at concerts.³ Metal energizes the body, transforming space and social relations. The visual language of metal album covers and the spectacular stage shows offer larger-than-life images tied to fantasies of social power, just as in the more prestigious musical spectacles of opera. The clothing and hairstyles of metal fans, as much as the music itself, mark social spaces from concert halls to bedrooms to streets, claiming them in the name of a heavy metal community. And all of these aspects of power provoke strong reactions from those outside heavy metal, including fear and censorship.

The names chosen by heavy metal bands evoke power and intensity in many different ways. Bands align themselves with electrical and mechanical power (Tesla, AC/DC, Motörhead), dangerous or unpleasant animals (Ratt, Scorpions), dangerous or unpleasant people (Twisted Sister, Motley Crüe, Quiet Riot), or dangerous and unpleasant objects (Iron Maiden). They can invoke the auratic power of blasphemy or mysticism (Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult) or the terror of death itself (Anthrax, Poison, Megadeth, Slayer). Heavy metal can even claim power by being self-referential (Metallica) or by transgressing convention with an antipower name (Cinderella, Kiss). Some bands add umlauts (Motörhead, Motley Crüe, Queensrÿche) to mark their names as archaic or gothic.⁴

If there is one feature that underpins the coherence of heavy metal as a genre, it is the power chord. Produced by playing the musical interval of a perfect fourth or fifth on a heavily amplified and distorted electric guitar, the power chord is used by all of the bands that are ever called heavy metal and, until heavy metal’s enormous influence on other musical genres in the late 1980s, by comparatively few musicians outside the genre. The power chord can be percussive and rhythmic or indefinitely sustained; it is used both to articulate and to suspend time. It is a complex sound, made up of resultant tones and overtones, constantly renewed and energized by feedback. It is at once the musical basis of heavy metal and an apt metaphor for it, for musical articulation of power is the most important single factor in the experience of heavy metal. The power chord seems simple and crude, but it is dependent upon sophisticated technology, precise tuning, and skillful control. Its cwerdriven sound evokes excess and transgression but also stability, permanance, and harmony.

But what is the nature of this power? Where does it come from, how is it generated, mobilized, circulated? How can heavy metal music articulate claims to power, and what social tensions are addressed or mediated by it? These are the issues that animate this book. In chapter 2, I will take up the problem of defining heavy metal structurally, as a musical discourse comprising a coherent system of signs such as power chords. In this one, I will be concerned with a more functional view of heavy metal as a genre, with the processes of definition and contestation that go on among those concerned with the music. In other words, I will be focusing here on how heavy metal gets construed—by fans, historians, academics, and critics.⁵ The essential characteristics of heavy metal not only vary according to these different perspectives, but the very existence of something called heavy metal depends upon the ongoing arguments of those involved. Heavy metal is, like all culture, a site of struggle over definitions, dreams, behaviors, and resources.

Genre and Commercial Mediation

Discursive practices are characterized by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories. Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate its exclusions and choices. —Michel Foucault⁶

I hate that term “heavy metal.” —Angus Young, AC/DC

Heavy metal began to attain stylistic identity in the late 1960s as a “harder” sort of hard rock, and a relatively small but fiercely loyal subculture formed around it during the 1970s. Because heavy metal threatened to antagonize demographically targeted audiences, metal bands received virtually no radio airplay, and they had to support their album releases by constant touring, playing to an audience that was mostly young, white, male, and working class.⁷ The 1980s was the decade of heavy metal’s emergence as a massively popular musical style, as it burgeoned in both commercial success and stylistic variety. The heavy metal audience became increasingly gender-balanced and middle-class, and its age range expanded to include significant numbers of preteens and people in their late twenties. By 1989, heavy metal accounted for as much as 40 percent of all sound recordings sold in the United States, and Rolling Stone announced that heavy metal now constituted “the mainstream of rock and roll.”⁸ By then, metal had diversified into a number of styles and influenced other musical discourses. The term “heavy metal” itself became an open site of contestation, as fans, musicians, and historians struggled with the prestige—and notoriety—of a genre name that seemed no longer able to contain disparate musical styles and agendas.

Thus, heavy metal is not monolithic; it embraces many different musical and visual styles, many kinds of lyrics and behaviors. “Heavy metal” is a term that is constantly debated and contested, primarily among fans but also in dialogue with musicians, commercial marketing strategists, and outside critics and censors. Debates over which bands, songs, sounds, and sights get to count as heavy metal provide occasions for contesting musical and social prestige. “That’s not heavy metal” is the most damning music criticism a fan can inflict, for that genre name has great prestige among fans. But genre boundaries are not solid or clear; they are conceptual sites of struggles over the meanings and prestige of social signs.

Fans care, often passionately, about difference; they find certain bands and songs meaningful and relevant to their lives, while others leave them indifferent or repulsed. But there are institutional pressures for a kind of generic coherence that effaces such distinctions. Fan magazines try to apply “heavy metal” very broadly, to attract as many readers as possible. But their editors must negotiate discursive boundaries cautiously. Magazines that define themselves as wholly or primarily about heavy metal strive to appear as inclusive as possible, in part to advise fans on new bands or even to market those new bands for the sake of record company sponsors, but also because every fan wants to read about (and look at pictures of) his or her favorites in every issue. On the other hand, to include bands that fans do not accept as metal would weaken the magazine’s credibility and the fans’ enjoyment of the heavy metal “world” portrayed.⁹

Record clubs (“Grab Ten Headbanging Flits for 1¢!”) and fan merchandisers work to produce a notion of heavy metal that is inclusive and indiscriminate, just as in classical music, where orchestra advertising, music appreciation books, and record promoters campaign to erase historical specificity in order to stimulate consumption. And just as the promoters of classical music offer encounters with unspecified “greatness,” those who market heavy metal present it vaguely, as participation in generalized rebellion and intensity.¹⁰ But in both cases the coherence of the genre and the prestige of its history are crucial concerns of the music industry. An executive for Polygram Records describes the company’s success in mobilizing a sense of heavy metal history as a marketing tool: “We used an in-store campaign for Deep Purple that emphasized peer pressure. Many of the potential buyers of DP records are too young to remember the band in its previous incarnation. So we had to instill in these young metal fans that they were not really hip, not dedicated headbangers until they knew about Deep Purple. The campaign was very successful.”¹¹

Rigid genre boundaries are more useful to the music industry than to fans, and the commercial strategy of hyping cultural genres while striving to obliterate the differences that make individual choices meaningful often works very effectively to mobilize efficient consumption (nowhere more so than in classical music). But not always. The consequences of such a coarse view of heavy metal can be seen in the failure of the biggest metal concert tour of 1988. Touted as the heavy metal event of the decade, the Monsters of Rock tour during the summer of 1988 was a mammoth disappointment for fans and promoters alike. At the moment of heavy metal’s greatest popularity ever, several of the world’s most successful heavy metal bands were assembled for a U.S. tour: Van Halen, Scorpions, Metallica, Dokken, and Kingdom Come. These were some of the biggest names in metal, yet attendance throughout the tour was surprisingly light, and it became clear that the promoters who had assembled the tour suffered substantial losses because they had misunderstood the genre of heavy metal: they saw it as monolithic, failing to realize that heavy metal and its audience are not homogeneous, that fans’ allegiances are complex and specific. Many fans came to the Monsters of Rock concerts just to hear one or two bands; many Metallica fans, for example, despise bands like Scorpions and Kingdom Come. Waves of partisan arrivals and departures at the concert helped defuse the excitement normally generated in full arenas, and the fans’ selective attendance undercut the concession and souvenir sales that are so important to underwriting tour expenses and profits.¹²

The crude assumptions about genre that sank the Monsters of Rock tour are also endemic in writings about metal, from the rectitudinous denunciations of would-be censors to sociologists’ “objective” explanations—nearly everywhere, in fact, but in the magazines read by the fans themselves, where such totalizing errors could never be taken seriously. Outsiders’ representations of heavy metal as monolithic stand in stark contrast to the fans’ views, which prize difference and specificity. Because the magazines present heavy metal as exciting and prestigious at the same time that they apply the term more broadly than most fans can accept, the magazine itself becomes a site for contestation of the term. Writers of record reviews and articles gain credibility with their readers by arguing for distinctions that may contradict the inclusive stance of the magazine itself. But fans also contribute their perspectives directly through the letters columns that begin each issue. For example, one fan wrote to offer his canon of the best metal bands; his letter is emphatic about the importance of genre, and he sees “heavy metal” as a distinction of great value, something that can be attained and then lost:

Some other good groups are Accept, from Germany, and Exciter, Heaven, Twisted Sister, Girls School, Wild Dogs and so many others. Van Halen was once Heavy Metal but they got stuck on themselves. Van Halen is now what we refer to as “Bubblegum” hard rock. Loverboy, ZZ Top and Zebra are all hard rock. There is a difference between hard rock and Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal is actually a “New Wave” music for the 80s.¹³

Another fan addressed the controversial split between glam and speed metal, rebutting the many hostile letters that disparage one side or the other. She takes a liberal stance that retains the label “heavy metal” for her favorite band but acknowledges the merit of its incompatible cousins: “Poison and Metallica shouldn’t even be compared really. Poison is heavy metal. Metallica is speed metal. Poison is good at what they do, and Metallica is good at what they do.”¹⁴ The letters columns of magazines like RIP or Hit Parader also serve as forums for other kinds of debates, including discussions of sexism, homophobia, and racism. Fans often write in to critique the representations of gender and race they find in heavy metal lyrics, interviews with musicians, and journalism.¹⁵

Musicians who are considered heavy metal by their fans may vary greatly in their allegiance to the genre. Judas Priest’s goal has been “to achieve the definition of heavy metal,” while members of AC/DC and Def Leppard claim to hate the term, even though all three bands are mainstay subjects of heavy metal fandom.¹⁶ Many writers and fans consider Led Zeppelin the fount of heavy metal: “Quite simply, Led Zeppelin is, was, and will always be the ultimate heavy metal masters.”¹⁷ But Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, rejects that characterization, saying, for example, of the band’s first album, “That was not heavy metal. There was nothing heavy about that at all…. It was ethereal.”¹⁸

There are many reasons for bands to position themselves carefully with respect to a genre label. Their account of their relationship to heavy metal can imply or deny historical and discursive connections to other music. But more important, it situates them with respect to audiences, interpretative norms, and institutional channels. Guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen denies any connection with metal out of contempt for a genre that he views as technically and aesthetically inferior to his own music. Malmsteen hopes to gain greater prestige as an artist than is normally granted to metal musicians, but he is also bidding for the radio play that is often denied them.¹⁹ Iron Maiden has ahvays depended on selling tickets and albums to hard-core metal fans; they have no other audience. Yet the group’s singer, Bruce Dickinson, affects nonchalance when discussing the genre and their place in it: “What is your viewpoint? I wouldn’t call UFO a heavy metal band, but if you happen to be a fan of Human League, they probably are. And if you’re a fan of Motörhead, UFO aren’t heavy metal. If we said we are heavy metal, it wouldn’t matter much in the way we sound. It’s a category.”²⁰ Many artists bridle at genre categories because they see them as restrictive stereotypes, implying formulaic composition. Dickinson resists being pigeonholed by pointing to the relative, rather than absolute, nature of genre distinctions. But he must feign indifference to the meaningfulness of genre to fans and institutions in order to claim this appearance of artistic freedom.

The music of Rush meets the criteria of the definition of heavy metal held by most outsiders but fails the standards of most metal fans. Geddy Lee, the band’s singer and bass player, muses on the problematic status of his band: “It’s funny. When you talk to metal people about Rush, eight out of ten will tell you that we’re not a metal band. But if you talk to anyone outside of metal, eight out of ten will tell you we are a metal band. Metal is a very broad term.”²¹ There is, of course, a great deal of coherence in the genre of heavy metal; there are many bands that would be considered metal by virtually all fans. But genres are defined not only through internal features of the artists or the texts but also through commercial strategies and the conflicting valorizations of audiences. These debates over heavy metal are grounded in historical formations of meaning and prestige. To understand the priorities and values of heavy metal musicians and fans, we will need to examine their history.

Casting Heavy Metal

The term “heavy metal” has been applied to popular music since the late 1960s, when it began to appear in the rock press as an adjective; in the early 1970s it became a noun and thus a genre. The spectacular increase in the popularity of heavy metal during the 1980s prompted many critics and scholars of popular music to begin to write metal’s history. In histories of rock and of American music, in encyclopedias of popular music, in books and periodicals aimed at the dedicated metal fan or the quizzical outsider, writers began to construct a history of the genre. These historians have all understood their task similarly: they have attempted to define the boundaries of a musical genre and to produce a narrative of the formation and development of that genre, usually in the context of the history of rock music. The best of these histories, such as Philip Bashe’s Heavy Metal Thunder or Wolf Marshall’s articles in Guitar for the Practicing Musician, are insightful and lucid, written by journalists with intimate knowledge of the bands and their fans.²²

Histories typically begin with a problem most writers regard as essential: the question of the origin of the term “heavy metal.” The first appearance of “heavy metal” in a song lyric is generally agreed to be in Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” a hit motorcycle anthem of 1968, celebrating the “heavy metal thunder” of life in the fast lane. But the term “heavy metal,” we are usually told, had burst into popular consciousness in 1962, with the U.S. publication of William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, a beat junkie’s fantasies and confessions of drugs, sleaze, and violent sex. Burroughs is often credited with inventing the term and sometimes even with inspiring the genre. Some sources claim that Steppenwolf lifted the phrase directly from Burroughs’s book, although no one has provided any evidence for that link.

This story of the origin of “heavy metal” appears in nearly every recounting of metal’s history.²³ It is, however, not only simplistic but wrong, since the phrase “heavy metal” does not actually appear anywhere in Naked Lunch (although a later novel by Burroughs, Nova Express (1964), introduces as characters “The Heavy Metal Kid” and the “Heavy Metal People of Uranus”). At some point this notion of origin got planted in rock journalism, and the appeal of a clear point of origin led others to perpetuate the error.²⁴ But as we are reminded by The Oxford English Dictionary, “heavy metal” enjoyed centuries of relevant usage as a term for ordnance and poisonous compounds. The long-standing use of the phrase as a technical term in chemistry, metallurgy, and discussions of pollution suggests that the term did not spring full-blown into public awareness from an avant-garde source. “Heavy metal poisoning” is a diagnosis that has long had greater cultural currency than Burroughs’s book has had, and the scientific and medical uses of the term “heavy metal” are even cognate, since they infuse the music with values of danger and weight, desirable characteristics in the eyes of late 1960s rock musicians. The evidence suggests that the term circulated long before Steppenwolf or even Burroughs and that its meaning is rich and associative rather than an arbitrary label invented at some moment. Eventually, “heavy metal” began to be used to refer specifically to popular music in the early 1970s, in the writings of Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh at Creem.

A heavy metal genealogy ought to trace the music back to African-American blues, but this is seldom done. Just as histories of North America begin with the European invasion, the histories of musical genres such as rock and heavy metal commonly begin at the point of white dominance. But to emphasize Black Sabbath’s contribution of occult concerns to rock is to forget Robert Johnson’s struggles with the Devil and Howlin’ Wolf’s meditations on the problem of evil. To trace heavy metal vocal style to Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant is to forget James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” To deify white rock guitarists like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page is to forget the black American musicians they were trying to copy; to dwell on the prowess of these guitarists is to relegate Jimi Hendrix, the most virtuosic rock guitarist of the 1960s, to the fringes of music history. The debt of heavy metal to African-American music making has vanished from most accounts of the genre, just as black history as been suppressed in every other field.

Rock historians usually begin the history of heavy metal with the white (usually British) musicians who were copying urban blues styles. Mid-1960s groups like the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Jeff Beck Group combined the rock and roll style of Chuck Berry with the earthy blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Along with Jimi Hendrix, these British blues bands developed the sounds that would define metal: heavy drums and bass, virtuosic distorted guitar, and a powerful vocal style, that used screams and growls as signs of transgression and transcendence. The Kinks released the first hit song built around power chords in 1964, “You Really Got Me.” Some credit Jimi Hendrix with the first real heavy metal hit, the heavily distorted, virtuosic “Purple Haze” of 1967. Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelic band, extended the frontiers of loudness, distortion, and feedback (but not virtuosity) with their defiantly crude cover version of “Summertime Blues,” a hit single in 1968, the same year Steppenwolf released “Born to Be Wild.”

We had a place in forming that heavy-metal sound. Although I’m not saying we knew what we were doing, ’cause we didn’t. All we knew was we wanted more power. And if that’s not a heavy-metal attitude, I don’t know what is.

—Dick Peterson, singer/bass player with Blue Cheer²⁵

These groups of the late 1960s, now identified as early heavy metal bands, favored lyrics that evoked excess and transgression. Some, such as MC₅ and Steppenwolf, linked their noisiness to explicit political critique in their lyrics; others, like Blue Cheer, identified with the San Francisco—based psychedelic bands, for whom volume and heaviness aided an often drug-assisted search for alternative formations of identity and community. Inspired by the guitar virtuosity and volume of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, late 1960s rock bands developed a musical language that used distortion, heavy beats, and sheer loudness to create music that sounded more powerful than any other.²⁶ Groups like Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge added organ to the musical mix; like the electric guitar, the organ is capable of sustained, powerful sounds as well as virtuosic soloing, and the combination of both resulted in an aural wall of heavy sound. Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1969), featuring the seventeen-minute title tune with its interminable drum solo, became the biggest-selling album Atlantic Records had ever had. Drummers of the late 1960s hit their drums very hard, resulting in a sound that was not only louder but heavier, more emphatic. Their drum sets grew ever larger and more complicated, along with the expansion of concert amplification and guitar distortion devices.

The sound that would become known as heavy metal was definitively codified in 1970 with the release of Led Zeppelin II, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, and Deep Purple in Rock. Joe Elliot, now lead vocalist for Def Leppard, recalls this moment, which he lived as a young fan: “In 1971, there were only three bands that mattered. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple.”²⁷ Led Zeppelin’s sound was marked by speed and power, unusual rhythmic patterns, contrasting terraced dynamics, singer Robert Plant’s wailing vocals, and guitarist Jimmy Page’s heavily distorted crunch. Their songs were often built around thematic hooks called rifts, a practice derived from urban blues music and extended by British imitators such as Eric Clapton (e.g., “Sunshine of Your Love”).²⁸ In their lyrics and music, Led Zeppelin added mysticism to hard rock through evocations of the occult, the supernatural, Celtic legend, and Eastern modality. Deep Purple’s sound was similar but with organ added and with greater stress on classical influences; Baroque figuration abounds in the solos of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and keyboardist Jon Lord.²⁹ Black Sabbath took the emphasis on the occult even further, using dissonance, heavy riffs, and the mysterious whine of vocalist Ozzy Osbourne to evoke overtones of gothic horror.

A “second generation of heavy metal,” the first to claim the name unambiguously, was also active throughout the 1970s: Kiss, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Judas Priest, Ted Nugent, Rush, Motörhead, Rainbow, Blue Öyster Cult. Scorpions, from Germany, became the first heavy metal band from a non-English-speaking country to achieve international success. Heavy metal shows became increasingly spectacular as musicians performed in front of elaborate stage sets to the accompaniment of light shows, pyrotechnics, and other special effects. Incessant touring of these impressive shows built the metal audience in the 1970s. Kiss, between 1974 and 1984, made nineteen albums, seventeen of which went gold (thirteen went platinum) with virtually no radio airplay.³⁰ Many of the most successful performers of heavy metal, like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, have never had a Top 40 single.

The rise of heavy metal was simultaneous with the rise of professional rock criticism, but their relationship was not cordial. Flushed with enthusiasm for the artistic importance of rock music, critics were deeply suspicious of commercially successful music, which smacked of “sellout” because it appealed to too many people. Many critics were also hostile toward visual spectacle, which they saw as commercial artifice, compromising rock music’s “authenticity.” With the exception of some writers at Creem, they abhorred the face paint and fantastic costumes of Kiss, the macabre theatricality of Alice Cooper, and the fireworks, smoke, and unearthly props of everyone else in heavy metal. The pronouncements of the critics had little effect on the loyalties of heavy metal fans, for whom the concert experience remained primary: Led Zeppelin’s 1973 tour of the United States set new concert attendance records, breaking the previous records held by the Beatles. However, critics contributed to the establishment of heavy metal as a genre, since such labels were useful to them, as they were to the music industry, then in a phase of commercial growth and diversification (including increasingly specialized radio formats).

Heavy metal record sales slumped severely during the second half of the 1970s, as attention shifted to disco, punk, and mainstream rock bands like Fleetwood Mac. Writing for posterity in 1977, Lester Bangs summarized: “As the Seventies drew to a close, it appeared that heavy metal had had it.” Bangs described metal’s obsolescence: “What little flair and freshness remained in heavy metal has been stolen by punk rockers like the Ramones and Sex Pistols, who stripped it down, sped it up and provided some lyric content beyond the customary macho breast-beatings, by now not only offensive but old-fashioned.”³¹ Bangs’s description of that moment was a fair one, but the 1980s saw the growth of heavy metal on a scale none had imagined.

Heavy Metal in the 1980s

During the 1980s, heavy metal was transformed from the moribund music of a fading subculture into the dominant genre of American music. Eddie Van Halen had revolutionized metal guitar technique with the release of Van Halen’s debut album in 1978, fueling a renaissance in electric guitar study and experimentation unmatched since thousands of fans were inspired to learn to play by Eric Clapton’s apotheosis in the late 1960s and Jimi Hendrix’s death in 1970. But the real boom occurred with what became known as the “new wave of British heavy metal,” around the turn of the decade. The United States was overrun by another “British invasion,” as important for metal as the Beatles and Rolling Stones had been fifteen years earlier for pop music. Singer Joe Elliot recalls: “As years went on, hard rock did feel a certain loss of popularity with record audiences. But around 1979 or ’80, it came back again. Suddenly, there was us [Def Leppard], Iron Maiden and Saxon doing really well.”³² Bands like Iron Maiden and Motörhead exported very different styles of music, but they all were experienced as a wave of renewal for the genre of heavy metal. For the most part, the new wave of metal featured shorter, catchier songs, more sophisticated production techniques, and higher technical standards. All of these characteristics helped pave the way toward greater popular success.

The next wave of metal came out of Los Angeles around 1983–84. Motley Crüe and Ratt spearheaded a revival of “glam” metal androgyny, and other L.A. bands, like Quiet Riot, Dokken, and W.A.S.P., gained international attention. Southern California emerged as the center of heavy metal music for the 1980s, and bands from other parts of the country, among them Poison and Guns N’ Roses, flocked to Los Angeles in hopes of getting signed to a major label contract. In 1983, Def Leppard released Pyromania, the album that brought them stardom, leading the metal boom of the following year. In 1983, heavy metal records accounted for only 8 percent of all recordings sold in the United States; one year later, that share had increased phenomenally, to 20 percent.³³ Dokken, Iron Maiden, Motley Crüe, Ratt, Twisted Sister, and Scorpions rode the crest of this new success.

The following year, bands from around the world joined in the metal boom: Japan’s Loudness, Sweden’s Europe, and Germany’s Scorpions all achieved widespread acceptance, not only in their homelands but also among English-speaking fans. Swedish guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen had comparatively less commercial success with his albums of 1984–88, but his extension of metal’s neoclassical tendencies greatly influenced other heavy metal guitarists. Malmsteen’s fusion of heavy metal with Baroque musical rhetoric upped the ante for technical prowess and inspired legions of young imitators.³⁴ Heavy metal fan magazines proliferated in France (Hard Force, Hard Rock), Italy (HM, Heavy Metal, Rockstar, Flash), and Germany (Rock Hard, Horror Infernal, Metalstar, Breakout, Metal Hammer), just as new magazines appeared in the United States and Britain (RIP and many others), and already established rock and pop magazines began focusing exclusively on metal (Hit Parader, Circus).

The popularity of heavy metal continued to increase throughout the decade. Billboard attributed this trend in the economy of American popular music to a shift in the subcultural support of metal: “Metal has broadened its audience base. Metal music is no longer the exclusive domain of male teenagers. The metal audience has become older (college-aged), younger (pre-teen), and more female.”³⁵ The release of Bon Jovi’s third album, Slippery When Wet, in 1986 was an important moment in this transformation of the metal audience, for Bon Jovi fused the intensity and heaviness of metal with the romantic sincerity of pop and the “authenticity” of rock, helping to create a huge new gender-balanced audience for heavy metal.³⁶ Bon Jovi’s success not only reshaped metal’s musical discourse and sparked imitations and extensions, but it also gained metal substantial radio airplay for the first time. A Billboard writer summarized: “Many credit the mass-appeal success of Bon Jovi’s ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ last summer with opening programmers’ ears to the merits of metal. Others give a nod to Mötley Crüe’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” for dispelling the notion that top 40 and hard rock don’t mix. Metal and hard rock have fallen between the programming cracks because of their predominantly teen appeal.”³⁷

In December 1986, MTV significantly increased the amount of heavy metal it programmed, initiating a special program called “Headbangers’ Ball” and putting more metal videos into their regular rotation. The response was tremendous; “Headbangers’ Ball” became MTV’s most popular show, with 1.3 million viewers each week.³⁸ Heavy metal’s spectacular live shows made it a natural for television, where its important visual dimension could be exploited and presented virtually unchanged. Once heavy metal achieved access to the airwaves, its popularity and influence increased sharply. In June 1987, the number-one album on the Billboard charts was by U₂, but the next five places were held by metal bands: Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhoads. For the rest of the decade, metal usually accounted for at least half of the top twenty albums on the charts.³⁹

The expansion of the metal scene during the 1980s, however, was accompanied by its fragmentation. Genres proliferated: magazine writers and record marketers began referring to thrash metal, commercial metal, lite metal, power metal, American metal, black (satanic) metal, white (Christian) metal, death metal, speed metal, glam metal—each of which bears a particular relationship to that older, vaguer, more prestigious term “heavy metal.”⁴⁰ Just as one of the major musical debates of nineteenth-century Europe was over who should be considered Beethoven’s musical heir (Wagner versus Brahms), metal bands and fans continually position the music they care about with respect to a lineage dating back to the late 1960s founders: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. Though allegiances were often complex and genre boundaries blurred, two main camps formed during the 1980s.

On the one hand, there was the metal of the broad new audience forged during the mid-1980s by bands like Motley Crüe and Bon Jovi, This was the heavy metal on the sales charts, with radio play, the metal seen on MTV and at huge arena concerts. On the other hand, a different camp disparaged the newfound popularity of what they call lite metal or the music of “posers.” These fans and bands attempted to sustain the marginal status metal enjoyed during the 1970s; they shunned the broad popularity that they saw as necessarily linked to musical vapidity and subcultural dispersion. The “underground” metal scene was, until the late 1980s, based in clubs rather than arenas, in subcultural activity rather than mass-mediated identity. Its literature often took the form of local, self-published fanzines instead of slick, full-color, national publications like Hit Parader or Circus. Sometimes lumped together as “speed metal” or “thrash,” these underground styles of metal tended to be more deliberately transgressive, violent, and noisy.

The thrash metal style coalesced in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles in the early 1980s, with groups like Metallica, Slayer, Testament, Exodus, Megadeth, and Possessed. The musicians who created thrash were influenced by both heavy metal and punk; Motörhead, an important pioneer of speed metal, has played for both punk and metal audiences since the 1970s. The punk influence shows up in the music’s fast tempos and frenetic aggressiveness and in critical or sarcastic lyrics delivered in a menacing growl. From heavy metal, thrash musicians took an emphasis on guitar virtuosity, which is usually applied more generally to the whole band. Thrash bands negotiate fast tempos, meter changes, and complicated arrangements with precise ensemble coordination. Speed metal was in part a reaction against the spectacular dimension of other metal styles; thrash bands appealed to “a new generation for whom Zeppelin and Sabbath were granddads but Quiet Riot and Motley Crüe were too glam.”⁴¹ However, though it is often compared to punk rock because of its speed, noise, and violence, thrash metal contrasts with punk’s simplicity and nihilism, both lyrically and musically. The Ramones and the Sex Pistols placed musical amateurism at the aesthetic core of punk rock; but to be considered metal, bands must demonstrate some amount of virtuosity and control.

Bubbling underground since the mid-1970s, thrash or speed metal broke through to the surface of popular music in the late 1980s, with successful major-label releases by Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer, at that time the Big Four of thrash metal.⁴² The breakthrough came in 1986, when Metallica’s Master of Puppets, their first album on a major record label, began to receive the acclaim that would make it thrash metal’s first platinum album. Metallica’s success sparked increased interest in speed metal among the major record companies, who developed promotional tactics to help bring underground bands to mainstream attention. Until then, speed metal bands had recorded on independent labels like Combat, Megaforce, and Metal Blade, relying on a loyal underground of fans to spread the word. In 1989, MTV sponsored their “Headbanger’s Ball Tour,” which gained wide exposure for Anthrax, Exodus, and Helloween.

By the end of the decade, thrash metal had successfully challenged the mainstream of metal and redefined it. Metallica and a few other bands were able to headline arena concerts and appear regularly on MTV, although radio play remained incommensurate with their popularity. Other styles of metal coexisted, despite a slump in heavy metal record and ticket sales in 1990, which was explained by music industry figures as the result of the economic recession and overexploitation of the metal market—too many bands signed, too many records released, too many concert tours—as the industry scrambled to cash in on the boom of the late 1980s.⁴³

Throughout the 1980s, the influence of heavy metal on other kinds of popular music was pervasive and substantial. On what became the best-selling record of all time, Michael Jackson (or his producer Quincy Jones) brought in guitarist Eddie Van Halen for a cameo heavy metal solo on the song “Beat It” (1982). Just as Jackson and Jones used Vincent Price’s voice on “Thriller,” on the same album, to invoke the scary thrills of horror films, Van Halen’s noisy, virtuosic solo fit well in a song about danger and transgression. As the 1980s went on, heavy metal guitar sounds became well enough known to be used in all sorts of contexts, to evoke danger, intensity, and excitement. Rappers Run-D.M.C. brought metal guitar into hip hop in 1986 with their remake of Aero-smith’s “Walk This Way,” and Tone Loc had a huge hit in 1989 with “Wild Thing,” a rap song built around guitar and drum licks digitally sampled from a song on Van Halen’s first album. Pop stars frequently used metal guitar sounds to construct affective intensity and control, as in Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible.” By the middle of the decade, metal sounds had begun appearing often in advertising jingles. Even ads for the U.S. Army (“Be All That You Can Be”) featured metal guitar in a kind of subliminal seduction: military service was semiotically presented as an exciting, oppositional, youth-oriented adventure. Rebel, escape, become powerful: join the army!

Like the boundaries of the genre, the history of heavy metal is widely contested. In October 1988, MTV conducted a survey of its viewers, asking the question “What was the first metal band?” The bands most often named were Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, and Metallica. The first of these is not a surprising choice; the others perhaps are. But Kiss and Alice Cooper did found that type of heavy metal that is heavily dependent on spectacle, while Black Sabbath initiated dark metal, oriented toward the occult. Even the choice of Metallica can be understood, as it was that band that brought speed metal to the attention of a wide audience.

The ancestors chosen by fans and musicians reflect the characteristics of metal they valorize. Some want to connect metal closely to the history of rock music, while others emphasize that metal is something new and original. Heavy metal vocalist Dee Snider stresses connections to rock’s roots and an “authenticity” grounded in protest: “Heavy metal is the only form of music that still retains the rebellious qualities of’50s rock and roll.”⁴⁴ Responding to the common perception of technological mediation as artifice and commercial mediation as ideological compromise, critics sometimes minimize metal’s musical and technical complexity:

While modern musical technology continued to gather praise from the elite caught up in its spell, a special breed of musicians remained true to “the roots.” Instead of layering their sound with electronics, they chose to turn it up! Rock and Roil, they said, was raw and gritty; a means of escape; an uncomplicated element whose purpose was to entertain. Those groups, the survivors, upheld “the roots” in their original form, delivered at blistering volume, filled with urgency and fury. They earned the title Heavy Metal.⁴⁵

Here metal fans are hailed as hardheaded realists, members of a grassroots community unswayed by the false hype that has lured “the elite” away from the clear purpose and simple means of early rock. Yet such explanations obscure aspects of metal that are equally important and collapse tensions that are mediated by metal, for much heavy metal places a great premium on virtuosity and innovation, on spectacle, on effects that can be created only with the help of very sophisticated technology. Heavy metal history, its genre distinctions, and the interpretation of its texts and practices all depend upon the ways in which metal is used and made meaningful by fans.

Headbangers

I Metallari di Salerno Salutano i Metallari di Firenze—Graffito scrawled on the Uffizi Museum in Florence, July 1989.⁴⁶

Who is the audience for heavy metal? As recently as 1985, Billboard asserted that heavy metal fans were still most concentrated in “the blue-collar industrial cities of the continental U.S.”⁴⁷ A different marketing study, conducted at about the same time, concluded that the metal audience lived in “upscale family suburbs.”⁴⁸ Probably both are correct; class background correlates, to some extent, with preferences for different kinds of metal, but heavy metal in the 1980s claimed a huge audience that overruns these categories. And they are an active audience; the fans I surveyed claimed, on the average, to buy a new metal recording every week, even though many of them have little money.⁴⁹ Heavy metal fans are loyal concertgoers, too; many metal bands, long denied radio airplay, have built their audiences through touring, and according to Billboard, metal “attracts a greater proportion of live audiences than any other contemporary music form.”⁵⁰

Fans of heavy metal are also, overwhelmingly, white. Neither the lyrics nor the fans are noticeably more racist than is normal in the United States; in fact, the enthusiasm of many fans for black or racially mixed bands, like Living Colour and King’s X, and their reverence for Jimi Hendrix suggest the opposite. If few African-Americans have been attracted to heavy metal, it is probably due in part to the genre’s history. For heavy metal began as a white remake of urban blues that often ripped off black artists and their songs shamelessly. If the motive for much white music making has been the imperative of reproducing black culture without the black people in it, no comparable reason exists to draw black musicians and fans into traditionally white genres. Heavy metal has remained a white-dominated discourse, apparently offering little to those who have been comfortable with African-American musical traditions. Moreover, it has been transformed into something quite different from its blues origins. Metal’s relatively rigid sense of the body and concern with dominance reflect European-American transformation of African-American musical materials and cultural values. At the end of the 1980s, though, musical interactions among metal, rap, rock, and funk became increasingly popular, perhaps presaging at least a partial breakdown of the racial lines that often separate music audiences (hip hop has already accomplished this to a considerable extent).

To begin assembling some information about metal fans and to make contacts for later interviews, I distributed questionnaires to fans at several concerts and through a record store.⁵¹ The fans I surveyed ranged in age from eleven to thirty-one years, with an average age of nineteen. This reflects the specific demographics of concert audiences, rather than magazine readers or record buyers, for example; a survey done in 1984 found that two thirds of heavy metal fans were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four; one fifth were under fifteen.⁵² My sample, like the actual crowds I saw, was almost evenly balanced in gender. Their occupations ranged from car wash attendant to law school student, from computer programmer to construction worker. Their parents’ occupations covered the whole gamut of working- and middle-class jobs, with the exception of one sample, collected in a bar in Detroit, which was entirely industrial working class.

The questionnaire began with items intended to pique the curiosity of the fans, such as queries about how long they have listened to heavy metal and how many hours each day, on the average, they hear metal. Further questions concerned subcultural activities, such as watching MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball” or reading fan magazines. Eventually, I asked more personal questions about age, occupation, gender, and parents’ occupations. At the very end of the form, most fans indicated that they were willing to be interviewed and provided their names and phone numbers.

I am making no claims for the statistical precision of my sample—I used it as a source of guidance and contacts with fans—but I will summarize the responses I found clear and useful. Nearly all of the fans said that most of their friends were also metal fans, an indication of the centrality of heavy metal to fans’ social lives. More listen to metal from recordings than from radio programming, confirming the importance of the fan activities of owning, collecting, and being knowledgeable about the music (and the paucity of metal programming on the radio). Nearly all fans sing along with heavy metal lyrics, suggesting that, however unintelligible they may sound to outsiders, lyrics are comprehended by fans. Although this contradicts some academic studies, it agrees with Iron Maiden guitarist Steve Harris’s observation that in the United States, “about 90% of the fans know the words to every song.”⁵³

There were substantial differences among the audiences I surveyed. Compared to the fans at a Poison concert, for example, Judas Priest fans were somewhat older and more likely to be male. While quite a few of the Poison crowd indicated that they play musical instruments, a clear majority of the Judas Priest sample played instruments and owned musical equipment. The Poison fans called “Top 40” their second favorite style of music, while Priest’s fans chose classical music as the runner-up to metal. One section of the questionnaire (which many fans told me was their favorite part) invited fans to indicate whether or not they considered various bands to be “heavy metal.” Judas Priest fans clustered around other hard metal bands, like Iron Maiden and Metallica, while Poison’s fans extended the genre label to Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe as well.

There was much overall agreement about why heavy metal was important. To avoid asking fans to compose brief explanations of complex feelings at the drop of a hat, I developed a list of plausible statements about metal from my study of fans, magazines, and music. I included a wide range of possibilities, including some that were mutually contradictory; fans were asked to check those with which they most agreed:

______It’s the most: powerful kind of music; it makes me feel powerful.

______It’s intense; it helps me work off my frustrations.

______The guitar solos are amazing; it takes a great musician to play metal.

______I can relate to the lyrics.

______It’s music for people like me; I fit in with a heavy metal crowd.

______It’s pissed-off music, and I’m pissed off.

______It deals with things nobody else will talk about.

______It’s imaginative music; I would never have thought of some of those things.

______It’s true to life; it’s music about real important issues.

______It’s not true to life; it’s fantasy, better than life.

There was solid concurrence that the intensity and power of the music, its impressive guitar solos, the relevance of its lyrics, and its truth value were crucial. Surprisingly, fans overwhelmingly rejected the categories of the pissed-off and the fantastic. The most common grounds for dismissal of heavy metal—that it embodies nothing more than adolescent rebellion and escapism—were the qualities least often chosen by fans as representative of their feelings.⁵⁴ Megadeth’s video for “Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying?” makes this point explicitly. A young headbanger is watching metal videos when his father interrupts: “What is this garbage you’re watching? I want to watch the news.” The dad brusquely changes the channel but his son switches it back, explaining: “This is the news.”

While the responses to my questionnaire cannot be taken as transparent explanations of heavy metal’s social functions, they are revealing of the ways in which fans make sense of their own responses, as are the collective understandings developed by fans through their involvement with magazines, friendships, and fan clubs. Besides the separate fan clubs surrounding each band (which are usually not clubs as much as marketing lists) there exist social clubs for particular groups of metal fans, from the Gay Metal Society in Chicago to the Headbanger Special Interest Group of American Mensa. Clubs usually publish their own newsletters (GMA puts out The Headbanger, and the Mensa group calls theirs Vox Metallum); they also sponsor social events and promote discussion of metal and related issues. Such internal analyses of heavy metal culture contrast sharply with most discussions by outsiders.

“Nasty, Brutish, and Short”? Rock Critics and Academics Evaluate Metal

Heavy metal: pimply, prole, putrid, unchic, unsophisticated, antiintellectual (but impossibly pretentious), dismal, abysmal, terrible, horrible, and stupid music, barely music at all… music made by slack-jawed, alpaca-haired, bulbous-inseamed imbeciles in jackboots and leather and chrome for slack-jawed, alpaca-haired, downy-mustachioed imbeciles in cheap, too-large T-shirts with pictures of comic-book Armageddon ironed on the front…. Heavy metal, mon amour, where do I start? —Robert Duncan⁵⁵

Heavy metal has rarely been taken seriously, either as music or as cultural activity of any complexity or importance. At best it is controversial; the enthusiasm of metal fan magazines is paralleled by the hysterical denunciation of the mainstream press and smug dismissals of most rock journalism. And like country music, metal is a genre that rarely inspires uncertainty in its critics; though few commentators lay claim to much knowledge or understanding of the music or its fans, such ignorance is seldom allowed to hinder confident judgment of both as simple and brutal. Even critics and academics who are scrupulous in distinguishing among the details of other genres display unabashed prejudice when it comes to heavy metal.

For example, the only reference to metal in a recent book on the rock music industry is this casual summation: “Today’s ‘hot’ rock is heavy metal, this generation’s disco, an apolitical sound more concerned with the conquest of women than the triumph of the spirit.”⁵⁶ Another new book on rock music offers nothing but heavy metal’s bottom line, apparently so obvious as to require neither evidence nor even argument: “This is not a music of hope, and in no way is it a music of real freedom, because it firmly rejects the possibility of actual change…. the rules of the form have been established … they cannot be violated.” Moreover, the author assumes that the credibility of this judgment will be unaffected by his nonchalant admission: “I don’t know anything about heavy metal.”⁵⁷ Articles on heavy metal in news magazines, like the infamous Newsweek conflation of metal and rap as “the culture of attitude,” usually replicate the same combination of derogatory stereotypes and blithe ignorance. In an advertisement for their special issue on teenagers, Newsweek located them in “the age of AIDS, crack, and heavy metal.”⁵⁸

Those rock critics who actually do know the music have rarely written anything about it that its enemies haven’t already said. Robert Duncan’s vivid description of heavy metal, quoted above, defiantly celebrates an outsider’s fearful view of metal. But his defense is superficial, never really taking the metal seriously as music or politics; he ends up muttering about “draining of hope,” “deadening of passion,” metal as “anaesthetic.”⁵⁹ Chuck Eddy’s guide to the five hundred best metal albums is filled with virtuosic style analysis; ultimately, though, Eddy seems envious of a nihilism he thinks he sees in heavy metal but that he could never quite dare to embrace.⁶⁰ Charles M. Young says fondly: “Heavy metal is transitional music, infusing dirtbags and worthless puds with the courage to grow up and be a dickhead.”⁶¹ Young makes some good comments about how metal creates feelings of equality and worth, but lacking analysis of musical and social tensions, his article is much better at asking questions than answering them. Other than Philip Bashe’s useful history and some fine analytical and historical articles in guitar players’ magazines, rock journalists have published relatively few insights about heavy metal.⁶²

Academics have achieved much less. The academic study of popular music is in transition; scholarship of recent popular music has until recently been dominated by sociological approaches that totally neglect the music of popular music, reducing the meaning of a song to the literal meaning of its lyrics. This is called “content” analysis, and it assumes that an outside reader will interpret lyrics just as an insider would; it also assumes a linear communication model, where artists encode meanings that are transmitted to listeners, who then decipher them, rather than a dialectical environment in which meanings are multiple, fluid, and negotiated. Parallel to this, it presumes a Parsonian view of society, wherein social systems tend toward a natural equilibrium, instead of seeing society in permanent flux, as various groups strive for equality or dominance. Most writing about popular music also suffers from a lack of history; with little sense of how music has functioned in other times and places, writers often mistake transformations of ongoing features of popular music for unprecedented signs of innovation or decay. Also, most sociological studies offer no integration of ethnographic and textual analytic strategies. Mass mediation is typically assumed to be a barrier, standing between artist and audience with the power to corrupt both. But while it is crucial to acknowledge that mass mediation functions to disrupt a sense of history and community, it is just as important to see how it can make available the resources with which new communities are built.⁶³

Quite a few “content analyses” of heavy metal lyrics have been published. Usually, the researchers who conduct such studies evince an obliviousness to power relationships, which they regard as “objectivity.” They may interview fans at school, with no thought to the constraints on articulation that are already in place in that setting. Students have little motivation to admit to knowledge of lyrics of which their teachers or parents would not approve, and researchers are too willing to see teenagers as inarticulate. For example, Prinsky and Rosenbaum concluded that recent efforts at censorship of rock lyrics are misguided because fans are too dumb to know what the lyrics mean.⁶⁴ Their study not only ignored the constraints imposed by the classroom environment and the estrangement caused by the researchers’ own “objectivity”; it also implicitly assumed that adults would do better, without considering that classical music audiences, for example, would probably be even less likely to be able to summarize song texts to their satisfaction. Many opera fans prefer not to know what the lyrics are, and the hermeneutic framework promoted by schools and concert halls emphasizes appreciation of sensuous beauty over understanding of meanings.

In another study, Hansen and Hansen assumed that the “themes” of heavy metal (sex, suicide, violence, and the occult, as they saw them) were obvious at the beginning of the experiment. Thus they chose songs they thought fit each category and had four undergraduate research assistants grade heavy metal fans’ understanding of the lyrics. For example, after reading two lines from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution”—“Evil thoughts and evil doings / Cold, alone you hang in ruins”—fans were asked “What does ‘hang in ruins’ mean?” The correct answer was “His life is a mess; every aspect of his world is in shambles.” Thus Hansen and Hansen reduced a haunting image to a platitude, made it sexist by inserting a male pronoun, and went on to generate an astonishing array of tables of data. Their study is framed by the assumptions that the music of heavy metal is irrelevant (they refer to “distractive influences produced by the music itself”); that images can be reduced to singular, literal meanings; that such meanings exist apart from the contexts of their reception; that sociologists and college students understand heavy metal better than metal fans do; that “correct comprehension” of lyrics is a measure of the seriousness and worth of a musical genre or a cultural activity. Hansen and Hansen were arrogantly “objective”; their study tells us nothing about heavy metal because their premises produced their results.⁶⁵

The growing impact of British cultural studies and new approaches to musicology has so far had disappointingly little effect on the study of rock music, despite the appearance of several pieces on heavy metal that claim that influence. In one of the earliest academic articles about heavy metal, Will Straw argued in 1984 that metal fans do not comprise a subculture because fans don’t engage in subcultural activities, such as record collecting and magazine reading, and because there are no intermediate strata between fans and stars, which indicated little chance for participation. All of these assertions are contradicted by my research, although it is possible that Straw’s assessment may have been partially true of heavy metal at an earlier moment. It is difficult to know how much credence to give to his arguments, however, since Straw gives no evidence of ever having read a fan magazine, talked with a fan, attended a concert, or even listened to a record. The first published version of his paper “explained” heavy metal as an epiphenomenon of record industry shifts, thus removing politics and agency from the activities of everyone except record industry executives.⁶⁶

Marcus Breen has offered an explanation of heavy metal that combines the worst characteristics of postmodern theorizing. For Breen, metal celebrates numbness and oblivion; it is “a joyride into the spirit of post-industrial alienation.”⁶⁷ Such conclusions are possible because Breen’s analysis is equally unhampered by musical analysis and ethnography. In an amazing flight of fancy, he imagines that when Axl Rose sang, “I want to see you bleed” (in “Welcome to the Jungle”), he might have been referring to menstruation. Lacking any understanding of how heavy metal could be a vehicle for meaning, he concludes that its popularity is due to the “modern marketing and selling methods” of a show business cabal.

Late in 1991, the first book-length academic study of heavy metal was published, Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal.⁶⁸ Weinstein is a sociologist, and her book has all of the virtues and faults of most strictly sociological studies of popular culture. It carefully summarizes the details of concert behavior, describing the icons and activities of metal fans and musicians. But Weinstein has nothing useful to say about the music of heavy metal, and her perspective is a familiar Parsonian one, grounded in “taste publics” and structural positions. “Music is the master emblem of the heavy metal subculture,” she asserts, a tribute that makes the latter static and trivializes the former. In fact, Weinstein regards the music as but a distraction from analysis; when she teaches about heavy metal, she no longer makes tapes available, giving her students only lyrics to work with.⁶⁹

Though her book is nothing if not an impassioned defense of heavy metal, Weinstein, as a sociologist, must aspire to “objectivity,” and she even disingenuously claims not to be joining in debates over whether metal is good or bad.⁷⁰ Weinstein’s attempt to efface her own participation in heavy metal (she has long been a fan) results in a particularly strange gap in the book’s coverage, for she virtually ignores women’s responses to heavy metal. Moreover, her objectivity fosters a peculiar sort of arrogance: she brags of having browbeaten one fan into admitting that his understanding of some metal lyrics was inadequate.⁷¹ Her stance hampers her social analysis seriously, for she rarely moves beyond descriptions of the pleasures of metal—musical ecstasy, pride in subcultural allegiance, male bonding—toward placing the activities of fans in the political contexts that make such pleasures possible.

It is not suprising that academics have ignored or misconstrued heavy metal, although it seems curious that few professional rock critics have found anything interesting to say about what was, in the 1980s, the most popular genre of rock music. For many academics, denigration of metal is a necessary part of the defense of “high” culture, while for rock critics it is as an easy route to hipness: their scorn is displayed as a badge of their superiority to the musicians and audiences of heavy metal. All see metal as a travesty of various dearly held myths: about authenticity, beauty, and culture, on the one hand, and authenticity, rebellion, and political critique on the other. If neither academics nor rock critics have had much impact on metal’s popularity with its fans, they have helped to shape the dominant stereotype of heavy metal as brutishly simple, debilitatingly negative and violent, and artistically monotonous and impoverished. Thus it is necessary to examine their views criticially in order to clear space for a different sort of account of heavy metal.

For both careless condemnations and flip celebrations can have serious effects: especially since the mid-1980s, heavy metal has been at the center of debates over censorship. Rock critics and academics have the power to sway public opinion on issues of real consequence, for their access to effective and prestigious channels of mass mediation makes their opinions more influential than the writings of fans and musicians. It is clear from the ongoing public furor that attends metal that this music matters: around it coalesce cultural crises in authority, threats of breakdowns in the reproduction of social relations and identities.⁷² Besides the sociological significance of heavy metal as a phenomenon that absorbs the time, energy, thoughts, and cash of millions of people, it is a site of explicit social contestation that can tell us much about contemporary American society. As with country music, such critical dismissals as I have cited are the product of a prejudicial view of metal as something monolithic and crude; many casual condemnations of heavy metal depend upon misunderstanding its complex status as a genre. But the significance of heavy metal, including the opportunities it creates for important debates over social values and policies, makes it imperative to sort out the social and commercial tensions negotiated by heavy metal musicians and fans.

Several recent attacks on heavy metal have made the import of these issues very clear; they will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5, where I critique several influential denunciations of heavy metal—by Tipper Gore, Joe Stuessy, and others—and propose what I consider more sophisticated explanations of the violent aspects of some metal. My task throughout this book has been to work toward such explanations, and my method is to examine carefully the sounds and images of heavy metal, take seriously fans’ statements and activities, and situate metal as an integral part of a social context that is complex, conflicted, and inequitable. This chapter has explored the interests and tensions that have defined “heavy metal” as a genre with a history. In it, I have taken a functional approach to the study of metal, stressing the ways that genres are constituted through social contestation and transformation. The following chapter takes a more structural tack, investigating the specific musical characteristics that underpin heavy metal as a discourse.