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8 books match the query 'Heavy Metal'

cover of Connecting Metal to Culture: Unity in Disparity

Connecting Metal to Culture

Unity in Disparity

Edited by Mika Elovaara and Bryan Bardine

Intellect Books, 2017

Though it’s given little attention—and even less serious attention—by the mainstream press, metal music has for decades been a major creative and cultural force around the world. This book brings together a group of contributors from Europe, North America, and the Caribbean to make a case for metal’s place not merely on the periphery of our culture, but at its very heart. Contributors attend not merely to the music, but also to the accompanying culture, and they offer intriguing insights into the rise of metal in places where it’s traditionally been little known, like the Middle East and North Africa. The result is a global portrait of metal that asserts its importance and its ongoing contribution to culture.
 
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cover of Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America

Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America

Nelson Varas-Díaz

Intellect Books, 2021

A historical and sociological journey through Latin American heavy metal music.

The long-lasting effects of colonialism—racism, political persecution, ethnic extermination, and extreme capitalism—are still felt throughout Latin America. This volume explores how heavy metal music in the region has been used to challenge coloniality and its present-day manifestations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, Nelson Varas-Díaz documents how metal musicians and listeners engage in “extreme decolonial dialogues” as a strategy to challenge past and present forms of oppression. 

Most existing work on metal music in Latin America has relied on theoretical frameworks developed in the global North. By contrast, this volume explores the region through its own history and experiences, providing a roadmap for this emerging mode of musical analysis by demonstrating how decolonial metal scholarship can be achieved. 
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cover of Heavy Metal and Disability: Crips, Crowds, and Cacophonies

Heavy Metal and Disability

Crips, Crowds, and Cacophonies

Edited by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack and Keith Kahn-Harris

Intellect Books, 2024

A study of the distinctive relationship between metal and disability.

Persisting across metal’s subgenres is a preoccupation with exploring and questioning the boundary that divides the body that has agency from the body that has none. This boundary is one that is familiar to those for whom the agency of the body is an everyday matter of survival. While metal scholars who contribute to this collection see metal as a space of possibility, in which dis/ability and other intersectional identities can be validated and understood, the collection does not imply that the possibilities that metal affords are always actualized. This collection situates itself in a wider struggle to open up metal, challenging its power structures—a struggle in which metal studies has played a significant part.

Metal’s preoccupation with unleashing and controlling sensorial overload acts both as an analog of neurodiversity and as a space in which those who are neurodivergent find ways to understand and leverage their sensory capacities. Metal offers potent resources for the self-understanding of people with disabilities. It does not necessarily mean that this potential is always explored or that metal scenes are hospitable to those with disabilities. This collection is disability-positive, validating people with disabilities as different and not damaged.
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cover of Living Metal: Metal Scenes around the World

Living Metal

Metal Scenes around the World

Edited by Bryan Bardine and Jerome Stueart

Intellect Books, 2021

An international study of metal music communities and subcultures.

This edited volume expands the research in the field of metal studies by examining metal music communities around the world, from Dayton, Ohio, to Estonia to post-apartheid South Africa and beyond. The chapters are detailed, richly embedded in local histories and contexts, and provide important analyses of their respective scenes. The diversity of the chapters connects metal to other disciplines in the music field and a foreword by Henkka Seppälä, former bassist of the Finnish extreme metal band Children of Bodom, accompanies the essays. Living Metal is a groundbreaking contribution to the field, with much appeal for fans and scholars of metal music as well as those in the fields of anthropology, musicology, and history. 
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cover of Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World

Metal Rules the Globe

Heavy Metal Music around the World

Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, eds.

Duke University Press, 2012

During the past three decades, heavy metal music has gone global, becoming a potent source of meaning and identity for fans around the world. In Metal Rules the Globe, ethnographers and some of the foremost authorities in the burgeoning field of metal studies analyze this dramatic expansion of heavy metal music and culture. They take readers inside metal scenes in Brazil, Canada, China, Easter Island, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Malta, Nepal, Norway, Singapore, Slovenia, and the United States, describing how the sounds of heavy metal and the meanings that metalheads attribute to them vary across cultures. The contributors explore the dynamics of masculinity, class, race, and ethnicity in metal scenes; the place of metal in the music industry; and the ways that disenfranchised youth use metal to negotiate modernity and social change. They reveal heavy metal fans as just as likely to criticize the consumerism, class divisiveness, and uneven development of globalization as they are to reject traditional cultural norms. Crucially, they never lose sight of the sense of community and sonic pleasure to be experienced in the distorted, pounding sounds of local metal scenes.

Contributors. Idelber Avelar, Albert Bell, Dan Bendrups, Harris M. Berger, Paul D. Greene, Ross Hagen, Sharon Hochhauser, Shuhei Hosokawa, Keith Kahn-Harris, Kei Kawano, Rajko Muršič,Steve Waksman, Jeremy Wallach, Robert Walser, Deena Weinstein, Cynthia P. Wong

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cover of Reichsrock: The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music

Reichsrock

The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music

Dyck, Kirsten

Rutgers University Press, 2016

From rap to folk to punk, music has often sought to shape its listeners’ political views, uniting them as a global community and inspiring them to take action. Yet the rallying potential of music can also be harnessed for sinister ends. As this groundbreaking new book reveals, white-power music has served as a key recruiting tool for neo-Nazi and racist hate groups worldwide. 
 
Reichsrock shines a light on the international white-power music industry, the fandoms it has spawned, and the virulently racist beliefs it perpetuates. Kirsten Dyck not only investigates how white-power bands and their fans have used the internet to spread their message globally, but also considers how distinctly local white-power scenes have emerged in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the United States, and many other sites. While exploring how white-power bands draw from a common well of nationalist, racist, and neo-Nazi ideologies, the book thus also illuminates how white-power musicians adapt their music to different locations, many of which have their own terms for defining whiteness and racial otherness. 
 
Closely tracking the online presence of white-power musicians and their fans, Dyck analyzes the virtual forums and media they use to articulate their hateful rhetoric. This book also demonstrates how this fandom has sparked spectacular violence in the real world, from bombings to mass shootings. Reichsrock thus sounds an urgent message about a global menace. 
 
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cover of Rock 'n' Roll Movies

Rock 'n' Roll Movies

Sterritt, David

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Rock ‘n’ Roll Movies presents an eclectic look at the many manifestations of rock in motion pictures, from teen-oriented B-movies to Hollywood blockbusters to avant-garde meditations to reverent biopics to animated shorts to performance documentaries. Acclaimed film critic David Sterritt considers the diverse ways that filmmakers have regarded rock ‘n’ roll, some cynically cashing in on its popularity and others responding to the music as sincere fans, some depicting rock as harmless fun and others representing it as an open challenge to mainstream norms. 
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cover of Scream for Me, Africa!: Heavy Metal Identities in Post-Colonial Africa

Scream for Me, Africa!

Heavy Metal Identities in Post-Colonial Africa

Edward Banchs

Intellect Books, 2023

An engaging look at the various metal scenes across the African continent.

Scream for Me Africa! examines the hard rock and metal scenes in five African countries: Botswana, Togo, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana. Edward Banchs interviewed musicians, producers, and fans in each country to create vivid pictures of each of these rarely discussed scenes. The book considers how the subculture of heavy metal is viewed in postcolonial Africa and examines how musicians on the continent have stepped forward to make this genre their own. It looks at Africa's blossoming scenes through various themes, including hybridity, othering, and political tensions.  
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