Contrary to decades of speculation about the poor mental health of heavy metal fans, newer research conducted with metal people has begun to reveal some of the more positive and nuanced connections between heavy metal music, metal culture and mental health.¹ In this chapter, I build on new understandings of metal and wellness by examining three domains of well-being through a lens of heavy metal identity formations. Specifically, I will discuss: (1) belonging and acceptance by like-minded others; (2) stress and coping in the social world; and (3) building resilience in uncertain times. Ultimately, I will explore ways that being metal can facilitate good outcomes in these three spaces.

Note the term ‘being metal’ that is used here, rather than listening to metal or enjoying metal music. Yes, the music is vitally important in any discussion of metal, but this chapter focuses on those who take the next step of declaring a metal identity – whether verbally by saying things like ‘I’m a metalhead’, or maybe in more visual ways like embodying a metal identity that can be seen and read on the body by others.

Identity studies have a long history of looking at well-being outcomes associated with identity choices. It is widely accepted that identity and well-being are tightly bound, for better or worse. It is also clear that metal identities are highly valued by their ‘owners’, so it makes sense to examine the nexus of metal identity formations and the mental health of metal fans and artists.

The arguments throughout this chapter are drawn from my previous research,² critical identity studies and my own life in metal. I conclude by proposing that the identity self-talk of metalheads, and its interplay with the embodiment of metal identities, has significant value for steeling oneself against some of the most pervasive social and emotional threats of modern life.

Identity Making and the Internal Conversation

There are many different theories surrounding our identity formations, or put simply, what makes us who we are in terms of how we define ourselves in the world. As an academic discipline, psychology has certainly been dominant in theorising self and identity. However, this chapter takes a sociological view of identity-making, particularly social-relational perspectives that view identity-making as something that happens between people.

Whether we realise it or not, our interactions with others give us new information or affirm existing information about who we are and what is possible for us in life. This includes our interactions at the micro level in our personal relationships and immediate contexts like work, school and community, through to institutional interactions at the meso and macro levels of our social system (like housing, employment, health and justice systems).

We all construct identity biographies, or the story of who we are, based on past experiences, present circumstances and future predictions. Think of it as a screenplay: we craft the story of our lives with ourselves in the leading role, and we make rolling revisions to the script as other actors enter and exit the scene, often throwing the plot into chaos. Sometimes we ‘write’ our identity narratives with a lot of effort and overthinking, and sometimes without even realising it, but we are all doing it, albeit in different ways, and we are testing our identities out and revising them based on the feedback we get and how we process it.

For example, let us say I am teaching a class and pose a question to students. If everyone looks at me blankly and no one answers, I might process that as negative feedback about my teaching capabilities. I might think, ‘I’m a terrible teacher, I couldn’t get the key points across, no one understood what I was trying to say, I’m a fraud, I don’t belong here’. Despite students not actually saying that to me, that might be my interpretation based on the interaction, and consequently, my teacher identity is likely to suffer a blow. Some identity ‘injuries’ are minor and easily healed, but some can be major injuries that may take a very long time to repair, if at all. It also depends on the importance we place on the portion of identity that has been harmed because we have many different moving parts to our identities. For example, teacher is only one of my identities; I also identify as a woman, a mother, a daughter, an activist and a metalhead, to name a few.

We ‘discuss’ and strategize our identity components in an ongoing internal dialogue we have with ourselves – how we are regarded by others is a crucial factor for shaping these internal conversations through which we come to understand ‘ourselves, our lives, the meaning of our actions and our biographical narratives’.³ This idea is critical for analysing how metalheads construct a sense of self in everyday life, particularly what we come to ‘learn’ about ourselves through interactions with others, and how this shapes our self-talk.

Of course, we all wear multiple identities, as mentioned above, but the focus here is squarely on metal identity formations and ways they play out in everyday life because being in the world as a metalhead often embodies a clear and compelling social identity that others can see and recognise. And furthermore, not everyone likes it! Metal identities have been negatively characterised as deviant and delinquent, apathetic and demotivated, socially undesirable or mentally unwell, to outright dangerous (think stereotypes of school shooters and Satan worshippers). So why then would people sign up for this? And why make such a point of embodying an (often) unmistakeable metal identity that is subject to negative stereotyping?⁴

If you believe metal’s detractors, it is because there is something clearly wrong with us. But if you start asking serious questions of metal people in respectfully curious and non-judgemental ways, you might get some interesting answers that challenge myths and stereotypes about metal fans and artists.

That is precisely what I did; I spent five years talking to (the same) metal youth as they left school, moved out of home, started playing gigs and touring, and got jobs. I got to know them well, and I watched them adapt to many different curve balls that life threw at them. The constant thing in their lives was their passion for metal, but the enjoyment consisted of so much more than just the music, although that was clearly the primary drawcard. Their metal identities were incredibly important for helping them cope with all sorts of things – things that, in one way or another, could fit into three key areas of well-being: namely, belonging and acceptance; stress and coping; building resilience. Further, the wellness factors participants described were crucial for supporting optimal well-being in everyday life, not just in metal contexts.

The metal identity narratives I collected were largely very positive, which of course mounts a significant challenge to the deficit constructions of metal fans as being more likely to be depressed or suicidal than fans of other genres. To be clear though, I am not attempting to present a utopian view of the metal landscape as being carefree and untouched by mental health concerns. Like all areas of society, metal too is touched by mental health concerns and suicide within the fold. But here, I argue that our understanding of metal identities has been skewed by uninformed stereotyping for a very long time, and for this reason, this chapter unapologetically presents a positive line of dialogue to redress the imbalance somewhat.

Self-Talk of Belonging and Acceptance in the Metal World

Building an identity and attaining a sense of belonging and acceptance are complex human pursuits. As social beings, we spend a lot of time and effort constructing a social identity that we can shop around until we find the right fit. In one way or another, it is generally a sense of community we are looking for, or at least communion with like-minded others whose approval reflects and affirms that our lives are somehow worthwhile, and our ideas are valued. Identity transactions like this are going on all the time, all over the world, among all age groups, as we all try and find our place in the world. Even those who consider themselves to be outsiders or against the social grain are forging their ‘uniqueness’ in solidarity with other outsiders, with a lot of metal people in this category. And so begins the entanglement of identity and well-being, which explains why we spend so much time trying to fit in to whatever we deem as important to fit in with – we intrinsically know that it is good for our well-being to feel accepted – a sense of belonging tells us ‘We’re okay, it’s okay, I’m okay’.⁵

Heavy metal communities make for fascinating case studies of belonging and acceptance. On one hand, there is the more obvious sense of acceptance that is possible for metalheads in their local scene or in face-to-face metal communities. The separation between artists and fans is usually rather minimal in metal communities because it is common for numerous metal bands to regularly play together in local scenes, and the musicians are fans too, and vice versa, even if fans are at the pre-contemplative stage of writing and performing.

Also common to artists and fans alike is the embodiment of metal identities. Not only are metalheads often visible to each other in local scenes and face-to-face communities, but complete strangers can know and accept each other.⁶ My young adult research participants described some of the more fleeting ways this can occur, such as seeing someone on a bus or in a coffee shop and having a sense of ‘just knowing where they’re coming from’ because of the band T-shirt they are wearing or a particular metal aesthetic. Of course, we would critically question the validity of statements like this, but the symbolic significance is real in the eyes of the perceiver, and that is the key point in terms of fostering a sense of belonging.

On a more practical note, some participants in my research in Australia had travelled internationally to attend music festivals in Europe and the United States, and to explore death metal scenes in South-East Asia. For them, travel experiences were opportunities to test out the perceived sense of metal kinship that they had forged from a very early age, long before they ever met another metal person or went to shows. They had some language barriers to navigate in the countries they visited, but the language of the metal shirt was indeed universal. They were instantly recognisable as metalheads and were welcomed into local scenes, and I am sure this will resonate with seasoned metal people reading this, who have been embraced by other local scenes when travelling (as I have).

In sum, the universal acceptance of being metal by other metal people⁷ is a legitimate phenomenon, and metal folks know it. But the interesting thing, from a well-being perspective, is the surrogate sense of belonging and acceptance that imagined community membership can also provide for those who are isolated and cannot access face-to-face communities, whether by choice or circumstance.

My research findings showed that establishing a sense of collective metal identity was the first step to feeling like a member of a global metal community. The metal youth I interviewed achieved this by watching metal media, participating in metal forums online, learning to embody metal identities and decorating their rooms with metal posters and various other pieces of metal paraphernalia and artefacts.

Long before they ever met another metalhead in person, their collective identity narratives fostered a deep sense of connection to a global metal community – albeit imagined. It was common to hear them say things like ‘that sense of community is great’, ‘we take care of our own’ and ‘we’re a tight-knit community’, despite the fact they did not know any other metalheads at that point in time. Crucially, this imagined sense of community was a significant protective factor for mental health challenges associated with experiences of bullying, bereavement, family breakdown and the social isolation of moving around (or changing schools) and not knowing anyone.

Based on the consistency of my findings and lived experience, it is plausible to suggest that the positive benefits of imagined metal community membership are transferable across the lifespan and in any number of socially marginalised contexts. Loneliness and isolation are universal; anyone is susceptible. But ‘being metal’ can go a long way towards re-authoring the stories we tell ourselves about being alone in the world – just pulling on a metal T-shirt can give us an instant sense of belonging and acceptance that can get us through the day. Further, this alternate belonging and acceptance can be seen and known by others, which can be enormously therapeutic for those who have been socially rejected by dominant cultural groups and norms, and even protective in social contexts, as I will discuss next.

Deploying Metal Identities to Manage Stress in the Social World

While participating in metal community life, real or imagined, is widely regarded by metal fans and artists as a positive experience, the broader social world is not always as uplifting. Family, school and work are three pivotal environments that many of us must navigate at some stage, as well as various social systems and institutions that make up our social landscape (think health, justice, housing, banking, transport, welfare systems, to name a few). Within these contexts, there are many social interactions to work through as well; some friendly, some hostile.

Hostile social relations can range from being mildly uncomfortable, to a feeling of vulnerability that something bad could happen, through to outright rejection and exclusion, and even a sense of imminent physical or emotional danger. Regardless of the nature or severity, the common denominator is power, and if we are the ones feeling hard done by, it is probably because we have been disempowered in some way – by either a person, a group, a process or a system that seems stacked against us because they are holding the power.

Feeling disempowered and disrespected amounts to a moral attack on our identity. When our sense of self is attacked and injured, it can leave us feeling hurt, angry and generally disappointed that we do not measure up in some way, or are not quite good enough, or worthy enough, of respect and inclusion (at school, at work, in peer groups or in any number of social settings).

Feeling disrespected can spark an intense desire for recognition and justice that is not being met, and it can be very stressful trying to reclaim power and recognition in alternate ways. When we talk about stress management and music, it is usually in terms of the listening experience and the calming (or motivating) effect that music can have on us.⁸ However, looking beyond the music reveals interesting ways the metal culture can intersect with identity and well-being to remediate social conflicts. Resistance against dominant groups as an exercise in self-care might not be a new idea, but it certainly offers a fresh way of looking at metal identities and stress management in the social world.

Think of it this way, if metal identities can create a sense of belonging and acceptance by like-minded others (or keeping the right people in), they can also be used for protection in socially vulnerable situations (or keeping the wrong people out). And this is where those long-standing negative stereotypes about metalheads can prove quite useful for some.

Most readers will be familiar with the 1985 US Senate hearings into lyrical content of (mostly) heavy metal and rap music. In short, the key arguments for censoring lyrics rested on the unsubstantiated claims that such music would send people off the rails, particularly impressionable youth. Conservative detractors opined that metal was ‘outrageous filth’ portraying and glorifying rape, incest, sexual violence, perversion and suicide.⁹ The testimonies were based on opinion, not evidence, but they had an enduring influence on moral and religious commentary – including the Catholic Archbishop of New York, who drew on ‘evidence’ from the hearings when claiming some years later that heavy metal music is spiked with Satanic lyrics that disposed listeners to devil worship and demonic possession.¹⁰

In 1988, journalist Geraldo Rivera seized an opportunity to capitalise on metal’s bad press by producing a documentary called Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground,¹¹ in which he tried to infer links between metal, murder and Satanism. Rivera highlighted several murders carried out by people who also liked heavy metal music. In the absence of any evidence showing that metal played any part in planning or carrying out the murders, the programme instead relied on sensational accounts of blood-drinking and human sacrifice to fuel the ‘Satanic Panic’ surrounding metal that was sweeping the United States at that time. In the decade or so after, metal was a ready-made scapegoat for numerous high-profile prosecutions – and was pounced on by prosecutors and media alike. School shootings kept metal at the forefront of moral panics too. For example, even though the shooters were not into metal, all school outcasts came under scrutiny after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, and metalheads were put forward by media commentators as prime examples of ‘outsiders’ and ‘loners’ in school settings.

I revisit these rather well-known cultural time stamps to set the context for exploring why people would sign up for a recognisable identity that could stigmatise and stereotype them in such negative and disparaging ways. We all do things for a reason, so what can be gained by being misrepresented as a dangerous, devil-worshipping deviant who should be avoided at all costs? The hint is in the last statement there, the potential for being avoided by others.

We have all felt socially vulnerable at times, whether that is a case of not fitting in, feeling rejected (or at risk of rejection) or being outright bullied, harassed or victimised in some way. This can occur at any time throughout the lifespan, but these things are often felt acutely during high school years. My research with metal youth showed a clear pattern of feeling socially vulnerable during high school – some just felt like outsiders, whereas others were overtly bullied by popular students.

But the one thing participants had in common was the sense of social protection they felt after they started embodying metal identities; they enjoyed being stereotyped as the dangerous kid who might be capable of shooting the school up because people finally stopped picking on them and left them alone. Some said that it ‘feels good to know they [the bullies] are the ones afraid of you now’ and that ‘you get instant respect in a metal shirt’. Others reported the well-being aspect of being left alone, saying that ‘it feels good to have space’ and like ‘you can finally breathe and relax a bit’.

The politically transformative properties of social movements and subcultural groups are not new.¹² However, many metal people describe themselves as loners or outsiders, and my research affirmed that political transformation tended to occur at the level of the individual for participants, which makes metal rather unique in its political capacity for redressing individually experienced power relations.

On one hand, being left alone and labelled an outsider does not sound promising for making friends and building networks. But if they are not your type of people anyway, then keeping bullies at bay without having to get in a fistfight with them can be quite a good and clever option. As it turned out, the metal youth I interviewed were all very introverted and non-confrontational by nature. They did not want any trouble, they did not want to fight, they just wanted to go about their business in peace and be left alone, which is a far cry from the stereotype of dangerous and violent metal youth. They were able to recalibrate power relations on their own terms.

During our teenage years, identity-making is vitally important for establishing ourselves, although we tend to have a rather limited pool of options to choose from. As we make our way through adulthood, more identity opportunities usually start to open for us: as workers, lovers, spouses, scholars, artists or members of leisure groups. But these can also give rise to new opportunities for hostile relations to emerge, including social exclusion from systems like housing and labour markets. The frustration of exclusion can present itself in complex ways throughout the lifespan; therefore, future research with more senior metal people could provide fascinating insights into the emotionally protective factors of metal identities throughout the life course. Anecdotally, the well-being factor of maintaining a metal identity feels true for me and other ‘older’ metalheads I talk to about this. However, empirical data from metal scholars is long overdue, given that metal elders are now approaching anywhere up to five decades of embodying a metal identity.¹³

Arguably, there is always an ‘edge’ to pulling on a metal shirt and keeping the world at bay when needed, regardless of how old we are. Finding retreat and respite are important mechanisms for refuelling our energy to meet life’s challenges and the resilience we need to forge ahead.

Metal as a Building Block for Resilience in Uncertain Times

The concept of resilience is no stranger to discussions of well-being; indeed, it is widely regarded as a significant protective factor for mental health.¹⁴ But the contours of building resilience in the context of being metal are especially intriguing and multi-faceted.

At its core, resilience is the ability to cope and bounce back from adverse life events. Our mental and emotional capacity to navigate life stressors also depends on how flexible and adaptable we are or need to be when facing uncertainty. Those of us who hang on too tightly to ‘what ought to be’ often have trouble going with the flow and accepting ‘what is’. Being too rigid about ideas and opinions only serves to make us stuck and hold back our progression through new ideas and learning, even when they are thrust upon us and not of our choosing, like having to re-skill after losing a job or learning to date again after a long-term relationship ends.

But when everything around us is in flux, like work, education, housing, relationships and so on, sometimes we need an anchor point to steady us in rough seas, and metal identities can provide a comforting sense of certainty and reliability. We may not always know how things will turn out, and we may not be able to control some things, but we can know who we are as a metalhead.

But metal is more than a fixed anchor point for resilience building. It can be a significant emotional resource for finding a way back from bereavement, family breakdown, health issues, unemployment and various types of victimisation or social vulnerabilities – but finding a way forward, in a tangible way, requires some skills and resources that metal can also provide, along with the confidence and motivation to deploy them.

Skill Building, Future Proofing

Around the time the ‘Satanic Panic’ was sweeping across America and beyond, researchers, most notably from psychology, were becoming preoccupied with ‘proving’ the problem of metal for youth development.¹⁵ Some authors took the suicide and mental health angle, while others started speculating that metalheads were pretty much pre-destined for low-educational attainment and low-achieving futures.¹⁶ The bleak picture of metal youth was one of dropping out of school, smoking pot all day, and barely being able to string a coherent sentence together, despite any rigorous research evidence to substantiate such ideas.¹⁷

In contrast, more recent studies have found metal youth to be rather gifted students with spirited aspirations.¹⁸ Whether or not they can achieve them, however, depends on a predictable set of social, economic and domestic factors that can impact all people, regardless of the music they listen to. This should not be surprising, but more interesting is the role that metal can play in skill development and confidence building, both of which are crucial building blocks for resilience and future-proofing the self in an ever-changing social world.

Metal is known from within as a DIY (do it yourself) culture which encompasses all aspects of musical production and scene maintenance. Indeed, participation in local scenes can provide extensive opportunities to build a diverse complement of both hard and soft skills – hard skills being teachable and measurable in nature like learning to write, play, record and perform music, engineering live performances and producing artwork and promotional materials; and soft skills capturing desirable attributes like good communication, effective time management, problem-solving, mentoring, organisational skills and teamwork required to maintain and sustain local metal scenes. The acquisition of these skills might originate in the metal context, but crucially, once learned, they are transferable to other environments.

Other (less obvious) opportunities for skill development are metal-inspired life choices like undertaking international travel to attend metal festivals. Participants in my research documented the important life skills they learned by embarking on international travel, such as saving money, budgeting, organising, communicating in other languages, and generally having to be self-sufficient in a foreign country. These young adults in Australia had never travelled abroad (nor had they travelled anywhere alone). However, metal was the motivating force ‘to save up and live the dream’, hence it motivated them to undertake further study and ‘get better jobs’ to fund future trips.

This is a good example of ways we reflexively incorporate new experiences into the identity stories we tell ourselves. These trips, inspired by a love of metal, had imbued these people with a new sense of purpose, capabilities, aspirations and visions for where they could set the bar in life more broadly. Importantly, their biographies of growth and empowerment had a significant impact on their positive outlook and overall well-being.

These outcomes might not be the same for everyone, but they should encourage us to rethink metal as a potentially positive developmental tool rather than a problem. Metal scenes and communities clearly provide numerous opportunities to road-test ideas and acquire skills and confidence that underpin well-being under the tutelage of good metal mentorship.

Conclusion

Outside of the metal fold, metal had a bad reputation for a long time. Discourses of deviancy, Satanism, suicide ideation, violence and generally poor life outcomes for metalheads were common in mainstream media and public sentiment. This chapter, however, has drawn on sociological research with metal fans and artists to present a more detailed understanding of the positive benefits of forging a metal identity.

No desire exists to convince the reader that all metal people are perfectly well adjusted, but there is sufficient evidence to drive an alternate discourse of metal music and culture as protective factors for mental health and well-being. In an era of unprecedented spikes in mental health diagnoses across the lifespan, it is crucial that we widen our scope for understanding ways that people deploy coping tools that might be considered against the grain by normative standards. If heavy metal identities are serving their owners well, that should be the most compelling evidence of all.

‘Metal is really inclusive’ – Let’s stop right there, my friend, and think: who are the most famous or influential metal bands you can think of? Chances are you have a list of men there. So, let’s reflect on the fact that the canon of metal is mostly white men from the UK and USA, with a few coming from Northern Europe and Australia. Heavy metal is a male-dominated genre, and it has long been reported to have issues with women, femininity and misogyny. What happens if we look at heavy metal and centre women in that history? Let us start by asserting that ‘woman’ is a socially constructed category rather than a stable or biologically rooted certainty.¹ That category, ‘woman’, is expansive and includes heterogeneous experiences of living in a gendered, classed and raced world. Let us, then, put women at the heart of our story about heavy metal and see what new aspects of the music and culture it reveals. Let us discover what new connections across musical and cultural contexts can be made. And let us glimpse the future for metal.

Heavy Metal Origins

Who was the first heavy metal band? Jinx Dawson (USA) could make the claim that her band, Coven, were the first to blend the occult with hard rock.² Their first album, Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls (1969), features a Satanic Mass and other devilish themes. Musically, it is similar to Jefferson Airplane, and Black Sabbath were compared to Coven on the release of Black Sabbath (1970).³ Dawson also arguably invented the devil horns sign now synonymous with metal.⁴ The 1960s was a difficult time for women making rock music, with numerous barriers of sexism, including sexual assault, hindering women’s achievements.⁵ A minority of women were able to break through into the mainstream, but Coven’s opportunities for success were further impeded by anti-Satan sentiment in the USA. Coven are rarely given their place in the canon of metal,⁶ an omission that contributes to the impression of metal (and rock) as a masculine genre.

That there were few women musicians who were successful in contributing to the early development of heavy metal does not mean that women were not present and important. In her fan autobiography, Pamela Des Barres⁷ describes the late 1960s West Coast US rock and early metal scene as an environment in which women were ever-present. They supported men in financial, practical, domestic and sexual aspects of their lives, which enabled those men to concentrate on making music. She also argued that women acted as muses, inspiring great love songs. Furthermore, they were involved in the production of the music, supporting, cheerleading, giving feedback: Des Barres writes of sitting with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin as they wrote songs. These roles are rarely regarded as being important in the history of metal, but in enabling great music to be made, they are as essential as the role of the producer.

However, this already raises questions about what ‘counts’ as metal and who is able to define the boundaries of the genre. As Laina Dawes⁸ argues, the origins of metal are in rock and the blues and, therefore, to consider the origins of metal means we need to ask who is important in blues rock? The received history of rock and metal is not only typically a male history, but also a white history that omits to take the contribution of Black women into account. For example, Big Mama Thornton’s hit song ‘Hound Dog’ (1952) pioneered the vocal style that was later similarly employed by Elvis Presley on his cover of the song. But Presley was white, and his song marketed to white audiences, so his version became the version, preventing Thornton from capitalising on her success, from which she never saw the profits. Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s guitar technique and distortion were influential on British musicians such as Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones;⁹ Odetta, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin, via Janis Joplin, influenced Robert Plant. Indeed, early reviews of Plant referred to him as ‘the male Janis Joplin’, raising the question of whether it is not Plant who is the authoritative look and sound of a (1970s) heavy metal vocalist, but Janis.¹⁰

These Black blues women can be considered as important to the evolution of metal as artists such as Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. We should be mindful that histories of popular music have typically written out the contributions and influence of all but a few women and people of colour.¹¹ Such histories are never apolitical. They serve the ends of those who would seek to reinforce the white male hegemony of rock and metal, part of a tradition which saw Led Zeppelin famously attribute authorship of songs written by Anne Bredon, Howlin’ Wolf, Jake Holmes and Willie Dixon to themselves.

Exclusion of Women from Music-Making

Despite the inclusion of a minority of women (for example, Maggie Bell of Stone the Crows), early heavy metal was regarded as a worryingly misogynistic genre, an extension of rock music. It came in for criticism from various feminist groups for articulating sexist and dangerous views about women. In the UK and USA, feminists set up their own alternatives to sexist rock in the form of Women’s Liberation rock bands. These bands reclaimed rock music and took innovative approaches to their sounds, including, for example, using horn sections. Their lyrics were about things that were happening to them as women, such as too much bad sex with men. These innovative women’s scenes did not really break into the mainstream or have much impact on metal; metal remained resolutely male-dominated and concerned with male issues as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) exploded in the late 1970s. But there was (and still is) Girlschool, the all-women NWOBHM band, who toured with Motörhead and released a joint single under the moniker ‘Headgirl’ (1980). However, for women, being in a rock band in the 1970s and 1980s was very challenging for a number of reasons.

Mavis Bayton’s¹² interviews with rock musicians, including members of Girlschool, identified issues such as a lack of disposable income to purchase instruments, equipment or lessons, or difficulties accessing rehearsal spaces and transport. A lack of personal space and time were also barriers caused by expectations of increased domestic workload for young women. Furthermore, women’s time and leisure activities were regulated by family members, boyfriends and husbands, problems compounded for the budding female metal musician due to sexist ideas about what kinds of music and instruments are suitable for women, and proscriptions on making loud noises. Not to mention the fact that men often did not want to play with women, that they did not value women’s contributions, that they hogged equipment and networked with other men to the exclusion of women. This suggests the significant value of finding other women to play with, a situation that enabled Girlschool to sidestep some of the issues that arose in mixed-gender groups. On top of all that, the music industry was (and remains) full of gatekeepers with sexist attitudes about what sells, attitudes that push women down particular musical routes, into the role of singer rather than instrumentalist, or which leave them out in the cold altogether. As Girlschool were told more recently when being turned down for a festival slot, ‘Oh no, we’ve already got our female band’.¹³ For women of colour, these constraints on music-making are compounded by racist sexual objectification and the idea that Black women should not play rock music.¹⁴

The Myth of Equality

Some argue that things have improved for women in rock music¹⁵ and that metal is somehow magically immune to the sexism present throughout most societies.¹⁶ The presence of artists such as Tatiana Shmailyuk of Jinjer or Rob Halford of Judas Priest is often rolled out as an argument in favour of metal’s equality and inclusivity. But the presence of exceptions does not prove the rule: as Pauwke Berkers and Julian Schaap’s¹⁷ analysis of the Encyclopædia Metallum shows, since the late 1970s, 97 per cent of metal musicians have been men, a figure which blows the ‘myth of equality’¹⁸ in metal out of the water. The ‘myth of equality’ is the persuasive idea that metal is a culture that sits outside of general societal problems such as sexism, racism, classism, ablism: all that matters is the music. If you like heavy metal, you are in, regardless of your gender, sexuality, race etc. (ignoring obvious exceptions such as National Socialist Black Metal here). Such a myth serves to reassure metalheads that they are already on the right team and that they do not have to do anything to challenge misogyny, racism, homophobia etc. However, this kind of magical thinking hinders feminist and anti-racist work and obstructs attempts to improve the conditions for making and enjoying metal. Speaking out means risking one’s place with the ‘in crowd’ of metal.¹⁹

Nevertheless, although there may be only a minority of women making metal, they do exist. And we might want to ask if they are represented adequately in the Encyclopædia Metallum: maybe there are more than the 3 per cent identified by Berkers and Schaap? We should ask questions of Encyclopædia Metallum’s criteria for inclusion when a very successful mainstream all-male metal band like Avenged Sevenfold are excluded. What are we to make of this exclusion? One answer to this may lie in the perception of the fans of metal, and in particular those bands or subgenres that have a predominantly female audience. Girls and women who love rock music are typically not taken seriously, perceived as girlfriends of male metal fans, only interested in sexual relationships with musicians rather than the music – the ‘myth of the groupie’.²⁰ They are considered to be unable to move beyond the dailiness of their lives in order to understand the transcendent qualities of the music.²¹ These myths and discourses interact with broader societal sexism that besmirches the culture of girls and women. The result is that not only are the girls and women regarded as second-class fans, but the music they love is disparaged and excluded from the definition of ‘metal’.²² Thus, what ‘counts’ as metal is not just an entertaining conversation, but a serious political debate about gender and race, with serious implications.²³

Gendering Genre

As a genre, heavy metal has long been theorised as ‘masculine’ or even hypermasculine, as it has built on the existing gendering of rock music. Writing in 1978, Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie’s feminist-informed article ‘Rock and Sexuality’ set the tone for discussions about heavy metal and hard rock. They examine what they call ‘cock rock’, as exemplified by Robert Plant, Phil Lynott, Mick Jagger, Roger Daltrey:

This characterisation continued in the 1980s when glam metal became a staple of MTV (although thrash and death metal bands sought to distance themselves from such imagery). The emphasis on lustful male heterosexuality was one of the reasons that heavy metal was the focus of a moral panic in the 1980s, led by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). The PMRC was founded by influential women whose husbands were US politicians. They were concerned that metal (and some other popular music) was a bad influence on children and that it encouraged them to take part in sexual behaviour, drinking, drug-taking, Satanism and violence, including sexual violence. W.A.S.P.’s ‘Animal (F**k Like A Beast)’ (1984) and AC/DC’s ‘Let Me Put My Love Into You’ (1980) were two of the ‘Filthy Fifteen’ songs particularly identified for censure. The PMRC sought to put labels on records to warn parents of the content of the lyrics and were successfully granted a Senate hearing in 1985. The PMRC have been widely traduced by the metal media, fans and even pro-metal academics,²⁵ to the point that the idea that the PMRC were entirely wrong and completely humourless has become an unquestioned orthodoxy. But in many ways the PMRC made a good point about the sexism and sexual violence in heavy metal.²⁶ The moral panic funded a number of psychological studies to show the impact of metal, which concluded that listening to it did not encourage children to commit crimes.²⁷ But studies do not stretch to understanding the impact on girls and women listening to the music, how the sexual violence and oppressive relationships in a number of the songs may make them feel, nor how such themes may normalise sexual violence.²⁸

Queering Metal

Whilst these are important considerations, heavy metal is a broad church, and in its many subgenres can be found songs that do not glamourise sexual violence. Indeed mainstream rock and metal songs tend to be much less likely to depict ‘degrading sex’ than rap,²⁹ although the moral panic around rap has an additional nasty layer of racism.³⁰ Robert Walser argued that heavy metal tried to create a fantasy world where women were literally written out, or ‘exscripted’.³¹ This form of ‘exscription’, if it exists, is a different kind of musical sexism, but the contradiction between Walser’s appraisal of heavy metal and that of the PMRC reveals that something more complex is going on with metal.

Sheila Whiteley³² and Susan Fast³³ argue that heavy metal and rock are more complex in terms of their gender significations than Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie claim. Signifiers of long hair, high voices and makeup (especially in glam metal) challenge the idea that ‘cock rock’ is all about masculine performance. Amber Clifford-Napoleone³⁴ goes further, arguing that whilst previous work on metal has understood it as masculine and heterosexist, it is better understood as a many-layered scene in which different marginalised identities – including that of ‘metal’ – can be layered together. Within these layers, there is a space in which queerness exists through BDSM, leather and the style-setting fashions of Rob Halford, Susie Quatro and Joan Jett.

In a further upset of the gender binary, Arch Enemy’s first female singer Angela Gossow sprang into the metal limelight in 2001 and shocked many metalheads by being able to growl. The growl is created by the vibration of the false folds above the larynx. It is low-pitched with a rough timbre. The shock was that a woman was physically capable of performing the growl, which was perceived to be too low for women’s biology. But, since there is no sex difference in the way the false folds work, there is no difference in men’s and women’s ability to growl. Instead, many gender conventions align to give growling the cultural ascription of ‘masculine’: low pitch, rough timbre, association with aggression (gendered masculine), and that men’s use of the style is more well-known than women’s.³⁵ Women have been growling in metal since the early 1990s, yet their vocals are still met with surprise and expressions of being ‘very good for a chick’, thus showing that in spite of positive evaluations by metal fans, the style itself is deeply gendered.³⁶

Women making metal are more likely to be making symphonic or ‘goth’ metal than other subgenres.³⁷ In this subgenre, they are typically singers using an operatic style. We can celebrate the inclusion of more women making metal, but we should question how the over-representation in this genre, as opposed to other genres, relies on restrictive and racist ideals of white femininity. The ‘female-fronted’ or metal à chanteuse genre name, which is often applied to symphonic metal, is often accompanied by pejorative media coverage, and it treats the genre as homogenous.³⁸ The ‘marking’ of some bands by the gender of its members indicates that women making metal are seen as outsiders³⁹ – after all, Iron Maiden are never referred to as ‘male-fronted metal’ or as an all-male band.

Empowerment for Women

Women metalheads do face sexism within the genre, for example, requirements that they ‘prove’ their fandom to men;⁴⁰ exclusion by male fans in group settings;⁴¹ male-dominated concert spaces characterised by groping and sexual harassment from men; exclusion from mosh pits and stage diving. Yet, for all that, metal can provide an ‘escape’ from everyday oppressions outside metal⁴² as well as alternative routes to self-presentation that do not rely on burdensome strictures of femininity.⁴³ And although metal is very often gendered as masculine, this is a problematic construction: the idea of gender itself is a social construction, and we should therefore be wary of reading gender onto music.⁴⁴ Taking a Butlerian approach, metal is not essentially masculine, but can rather be read more like drag in which masculinity is performed⁴⁵ without there being an original: the music itself is the reiteration or copy of previous performances of gendered music.⁴⁶ Indeed, metal supplies multitudinous pleasures for women metal fans: aural pleasures of enjoying the riffs and beats; visual pleasures of enjoying the spectacle of metal; erotic and romantic pleasures in watching musicians; enjoying the feel of the music in the body;⁴⁷ embodied experiences of gender transgression in the mosh pit;⁴⁸ identities which do not rely on physical attractiveness.⁴⁹

Metal as a Vehicle for Feminist Fury

Indeed, during the 2010s and 2020s, a space within metal culture has arisen for feminist musicians to scream and growl their discontents at patriarchy. Anger is a staple emotion of heavy metal, and as women have increasingly become more exasperated with sexism, misogyny and male violence, metal’s toolkit to convey fury looks increasingly attractive.⁵⁰ Not veering too far from metal’s conventions, some bands such as Castrator sing violent revenge fantasies against rapist men through ‘vigilante feminism’.⁵¹ Such bands draw inspiration from riot grrrl and place their rage centre stage. For others, metal is seen as the perfect vehicle for exploring experiences of violence, such as the victim/survivor’s experience of gendered-based violence in which the abused body of earlier metal portrayals screams back. Jasmine Shadrack⁵² argues that black metal is the perfect vehicle for purging the trauma of domestic abuse, as the genre is a way to look at the darkness inside ourselves. Similarly, Kristin Hayter, aka noise/metal musician Lingua Ignota, argues that noise/metal is a good genre for representing the experience of trauma suffered in domestic abuse.⁵³ There is a white privilege in being able to employ anger, however, because stereotypes of Black women as inherently angry make rage an unwieldy weapon for them. Nevertheless, Black women are making angry metal⁵⁴ and drawing on African heritage in the same ways that Nordic black metal might draw on Viking heritage and archaeological instruments. For example, Vodun (UK) use feminist lyrical themes related to Vodun religion and Afrobeats to create heavy Afro doom metal.

This exciting new movement, however, does not yet have the inter-band organisation of riot grrrl, the feminist punk movement that begun in Olympia, USA, in the early 1990s. Riot grrrl was successful because of the centrality of feminist solidarity and practical support systems.⁵⁵ Feminist metal has a little way to go before becoming a movement that extends beyond Western countries, although feminist solidarity in metal has the potential to raise consciousnesses and create empathy for survivors of gender-based violence.⁵⁶ That said, the internet and social media are facilitating new ways of being involved in metal, enabling women who previously lacked access to musical networks to get feedback on their music⁵⁷ and to come together to write and perform in women-only groups. The Chaos Rising collective is one such example, drawing in musicians from Europe, Iran and South America. Chaos Rising release a song a month, written and performed by any members of the collective, rather than being an unchanging unit of band members. The members highlight their different kinds of experiences and the need to be respectful of these differences, rather than locating their commonality in essential characteristics.⁵⁸ The collective is not an overtly feminist collective, but a space where women can come together to make music without some of the tensions and discriminations that they sometimes experience in working with men.

Conclusion

Metal is a genre that is often thought to be inclusive, but it exists in a sexist world, and so sexism is written into the genre. In many ways, the sexisms within metal are the same as in other genres (for example, the barriers to music-making), but the extreme masculinity of some subgenres presents additional challenges (for example, viciously misogynistic lyrics). Such misogyny has profound effects on women’s participation. And yet metal provides much for its female fans and musicians to get excited about. The new trends towards collectivity and feminist themes, alongside greater recognition for women like Jinx Dawson, provide an opportunity for metal culture to shift towards a more feminist consciousness, to work towards really being inclusive.

There is a wonderful Calvin & Hobbes comic published in March of 1992, where Calvin begs his mother to buy him a heavy metal album. She refuses accordingly: ‘The fact these bands haven’t killed themselves in ritual self-sacrifice shows they’re just in it for the money like everyone else. It’s all for effect’. There is disillusion writ across Calvin’s features – ‘Mainstream commercial nihilism can’t be trusted?!’¹

Bill Waterson’s comic dismissal of metal’s lack of sincerity in its provocation was not, even in 1992, a particularly new jibe. Theodor W. Adorno’s scathing critiques² of the popular music industry mourned the revolutionary possibilities and dulling of art as it is produced within capitalist contexts. Adorno had further extended this argument by the 1960s, where he was dismissive of the notion of a popular music ‘counterculture’: for Adorno, popular ‘protest music’ was ‘doomed from the start’, given the relationship of popular music to the same culture industry that manufactured and disseminated advertising and propaganda. The apparent inability of music to both entertain and transgress represents a longer, and much-debated, tension for performers, audiences and researchers of popular music alike. This chapter discusses what this particular tension represents for heavy metal music, performers and fans. Metal is a genre that has often spurned the ‘popular’, yet is nonetheless entrenched within, and has often benefitted from, the commercial operations of the contemporary music industry. Waterson’s comic is a helpful starting point for unpacking what it means to be rebellious in a genre that has long seen itself as ‘outsider’ music, yet whose transgressions are limited by both the realities of the commercial music market and the wider political contexts that it circulates through.

This chapter considers what it means for heavy metal and its fans to identify as ‘outsider’ music in the 2020s. Resistance and rebellion³ have long been central to metal’s identity and fandom, where metal has long traded on its reputation as ‘outsider’ music, a genre populated by proud pariahs that exist on the edge of acceptability.⁴ However, the true potential of such transgression has been troubled by metal’s commercial success, its diversification across different geographic locales and generational shifts amongst fans, where ‘resistance’ takes on different meanings and forms. Through considering how some of metal music’s most well-known scholarship has framed this ‘transgression’, this chapter explores how metal’s politics of rebellion and resistance have played out in fragmented ways as metal fandoms worldwide negotiate shifting ideologies, contexts and markets, calling into focus questions of the pop music spectacle and commodified dissent. Such a discussion points to a central tension for metal’s self-image: where the genre has seen itself as a site of transgression and liberation, I then want to probe how metal communities consolidate the prizing of transgression with the realities that metal texts, scenes and practices have often replicated many of the same older, conservative orthodoxies that circulate in wider socio-political contexts.⁵ This chapter thus leads with a central provocation: is it still possible for metal to be transgressive in the twenty-first century? And, to that end, has it ever really been?

This idea of transgression has been central to the ways in which metal imagines its own politics and discourses. However, as Chris Jenks notes, transgressions are ‘manifestly situation-specific and vary considerably across social space and through time’.⁶ In starting from a position that acknowledges transgressions are never stable, and are always context-dependent, this chapter begins with an overview of how ‘transgression’ has been framed in scholarly and popular accounts of heavy metal, before proposing three fragmented ideological positions that metal has found itself straddling as it exists in the 2020s: conservativism, progressivism and apolitical individualistic misanthropy.⁷ These are not exhaustive of metal’s ideological outlets for transgression, but rather I think these are tangibly indicative of tensions and extremities that emerge within and between metallic discourses of identity, community and resistance. Mapping these positions is useful to think through how metal confronts, enables or ignores the encroachment of wider socio-cultural phenomena into its scenic structures. The chapter concludes by considering metal’s position within the commercial operations of the contemporary music industry, and how the genre increasingly redresses its own communities and histories, and remaps the politics of metal itself.

Horrible Histories: Transgression as Metallic Capital

In talking about ‘transgression’, I draw on Chris Jenks’ work, where he states that ‘to transgress is to go beyond the bounds or limits set by a commandment or law or convention, it is to violate or infringe’.⁸ For Jenks, transgression is that conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries. However, he also reminds us that analysing transgression also invites analysis of its situatedness and ‘the character of the cultures … and contexts that provide for the appreciation or receptability of such behaviour’.⁹ Transgression was a core theme of the ways in which metal’s cultures and contexts were discussed in the earlier years of subcultural studies¹⁰: Paul Willis linked hard rock music to the countercultural ‘motorcycle boys’; Dick Hebdige defined metal as ‘a curious blend of hippy aesthetics and football terrace machismo’; Will Straw argued that metal had been positioned within a ‘genealogy of bad-boy currents’ in rock history. Such gendering of metal’s ostensible ‘rebelliousness’ carried on through the moral panics that surrounded heavy metal in the mid-1980s and early 1990s¹¹: Tipper Gore argued that heavy metal was a vehicle for countercultural rebellion that urged adolescent boys to go to ‘new extremes’; Carl Raschke argued that ‘the yowling and bellowing of the metal groups’ encouraged young men to adopt ‘a lifestyle of swagger, brutality, theft and sexual excess’.

This sense of metal existing on the ‘edge’ of, or as a response to, the cultural mainstream has informed much of the genre’s own self-image and scholarship.¹² Metal and its fans are positioned on the fringes of acceptability, the very ‘edge of music’; Weinstein then characterises metal fans as ‘proud pariahs’, who relish in their ‘outsider’ status. Nonetheless, she argues that this ‘outsiderness’ was also underscored by an absence of, and often antipathy towards, women, LGBT+ communities and people of colour. It is then vital to consider how metal’s response to the ‘mainstream’ might also function as a response to what was seen as the ostensible decentring of certain identities from the 1960s onwards. Much of metal’s generic cohesion, Robert Walser argued in 1993, has been dependent upon the ‘desire of young white male performers and fans to hear and believe in certain stories about the nature of masculinity’,¹³ where ‘true’ masculinity was taken to be under threat, and thus aggressively asserted within the ‘rebellious’ spaces offered by metal.

Metal, Masculinities and the Mainstream

Any discussion of metal’s ‘rebellion’ should then start with a consideration of how such narratives have protected certain boundaries, just as often as they seek to transgress others. Weinstein goes so far as to say that heavy metal subculture represents a ‘preservationist and conservative tendency’, where white, working-class male youth found an ‘ideological home in a nostalgic utopia’¹⁴ in response to their apparent ‘de-centering’ in the cultural zeitgeist from the 1960s onwards. Such an argument, however, assumes that metal’s ‘core’ audience is and always has been white, straight and male, limiting an understanding of the diversity of metal fans, and furthermore, how different contexts produce different forms of transgression. Nevertheless, this is a useful starting point for considering the tensions that surround metal’s claims to ‘transgression’.

One of metal discourse’s most time-honoured myths is that heavy metal music and culture is not only ‘anti-mainstream’, but furthermore, represents a space in which ‘true’ masculinity can be ‘reclaimed’.¹⁵ This narrative, which suggests masculinity is in crisis, or under attack, is a continuous theme across multiple decades. This perspective, Niall Scott notes, ‘perpetuate[s] the view that masculinity for the metal fan and metal musician alike is both hegemonic and in a state of crisis’.¹⁶ Metal, in this way, is understood as an assertive, masculinist response to the supposed disempowerment of masculinity, and particularly blue-collar disenchantment of white, working-class masculinity amidst deindustrialisation, which then becomes a key context for theorising heavy metal transgression.¹⁷ For Weinstein, such aggressive masculinity is a defensive response to the ostensible ‘weakening’ of male hegemony: ‘heavy metal music celebrates the very qualities that boys must sacrifice [freedom, individuality, power] in order to become adult members of society’.¹⁸

Much discussion of metal’s transgression has hence been largely framed through the symbolic figures of alienated young white men navigating the intersecting crises of masculinity and deindustrialisation, albeit in the West throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. Kyle Kusz argues that alternative rock, in which he situates metal, represented a ‘1990s popular music context in which we hear a number of songs by white male artists who express a desire for alterity and make claims of being disadvantaged and victimized’.¹⁹ These politics of ‘alienation’ within metal have been subject to sophisticated critiques, not least because of what Karen Bettez Halnon argues is a heterogeneous audience for metal, which disrupts any notion of consistently articulated, and hence alienated, identities.²⁰ Nevertheless, metal’s masculinist, ‘anti-mainstream’ critique remains a steady feature of scholarly work²¹ on its transgressive potential, where metal is positioned as a response to an ‘inauthentic’, ‘hyper-commercialised society’. Sanna Fridh takes this critique further in her discussion of black metal, arguing that metal operates as a response to ‘consumerist society and how it emasculates men through the feminization of masculinity … [metal works as a tool for] men to free themselves of the metrosexual shackles and experience themselves as authentic in a world where everyone is supposed to be the same’.²²

Fridh’s invocation of an ‘authenticity’ that transgresses consumerist, capitalist society invites further consideration, not least because of an approach to gender, which assumes that ‘authentic’ masculinity unfolds in largely hegemonic, and heteronormative, ways. This notion of metallic ‘authenticity’ in response to a consumer mainstream nonetheless permeates discussions of its transgressive possibilities. The ‘highly transgressive, for-the-music-only spirit of heavy metal culture’, Halnon argues, ‘has served as a boundary between itself and the dis-authenticating forces of commercialism’.²³ Metal’s more spectacular forms of transgression (namely blood, gore, carnage and Satanism) are thus characterised by Halnon as a particular form of the ‘carnivalesque’ that she then brands ‘heavy metal carnival’:

Halnon’s caveat of the rejection of commercialism, amidst commercial success, is hence a core consideration for metal’s transgressive potentialities. Nonetheless, while she argues against a ‘reductive understanding’ of heavy metal carnival as ‘the commodification of dissent’,²⁵ it remains important to consider how metal’s shock politics may be read as a purely spectacular rebelliousness within a wider consumer context.

Metal’s fascination with the spectacular and abject has been extensively documented elsewhere,²⁶ and certainly, this work offers sophisticated and valuable analyses of the politics and uses of bodily horror as an affective response to the ‘inauthentic’ nature of consumer capitalism. How political positions become entangled within and represented through such transgressions, however, is an ever-evolving and complex issue within metal. As such, where Halnon cautions against seeing heavy metal carnival as ‘ultimately a conservative phenomenon that restores and rejuvenates the status quo’,²⁷ it remains that many of metal’s most obvious images of transgression have been seen as reinstatements of deeply ingrained forms of social power.²⁸ The ‘horror’ of Norwegian black metal, oft considered one of metal’s most ‘notorious’ subgenres, is read by Laura Wiebe-Taylor as extending a tradition of cultural nationalism relying on the construction of a homogenised Nordic heritage;²⁹ metal more generally, as Scott Wilson has explored, has become a site for articulations of discontent ‘in the face of the expansion of the EU and its borderlands’.³⁰ Such analyses immediately temper the idea that heavy metal is not political; what’s more, as the remainder of this chapter discusses, they reveal how metal acts as a space for developing political critique. As metal’s audiences, performers, cultures and contexts have evolved, so too have its transgressions, and its potential to disrupt, reinforce and reimagine the status quo.

Discursive Transgression, Fascism and Conservativism

Keith Kahn-Harris’ notion of ‘discursive transgression’³¹ is an immediately valuable concept to consider the ways in which metal rebellion is asserted through political ideology. While Kahn-Harris notes that metal’s ‘transgression’ also emerges sonically and bodily, such a concept emerges alongside other work³² acknowledging the central role that political discourse plays in connoting ‘transgression’. There are, Niall Scott argues, a diverse range of positions and outlooks under a political heading to be found in metal culture; for Harris Berger, metal texts and fantasies are thus attempts to deal with various socio-political anxieties in complex and coded ways. However, such fantasies can play out with violent and extremely problematic realisations: this context hence informs metal’s relationship with what Kahn-Harris refers to as ‘the pre-eminent transgressive symbol in the modern world’ – Nazism.³³ Appropriation of Nazi and wider fascist symbolism has long been a feature of discussions of heavy metal scenes, and examples from an array of fairly mainstream metal bands such as KISS, Slayer and Motörhead are fairly well-trodden territory in the wider documentation of such imagery.³⁴

Such instances are oft-located within what Kahn-Harris calls ‘reflexive anti-reflexivity’³⁵ – i.e., playing with the symbolism in a performative manner, exploiting its shock value, without actively subscribing to the ideology. To position appropriations of fascist symbolism as purely performative rebellion nonetheless undercuts the very real power structures that accompany such signs. Attempts to depoliticise fascist symbolism, for Kahn-Harris, masks a highly efficient protection of the workings of power, where appropriations enabled the (c)overt incorporation of fascist ideologies into the operations of scenes. Fascist scenes are often taken to be isolated from metal itself; Hochhauser argues that fascist metal is a product of the white supremacist industry more so than anything else.³⁶ Nonetheless, this approach can overlook the ways in which fascist rhetoric can circulate in more covert ways in metal – Spotify took down 37 white supremacist and neo-Nazi bands in 2017,³⁷ but left many acts not overtly marked as ‘fascist’ bands. Playing off a fascination with fascist symbolism as simply ‘taboo’ items can also mean ignoring that such signs can and have been translated into scenic texts and practices which openly embrace virulent kinds of racism, sexism and homophobia – forms of oppression that are entrenched by large-scale power-structures.

Responding to Power: Liberalism, Progressivism, Anti-fascism

Situating metal’s engagement with fascism as purely a form of discursive rebellion is a complicated endeavour given the material consequences of fascist rhetoric, and the actual transgressive possibilities of such discourse. From this perspective, metal merely looks like ‘a self-consciously shocking dramatization of deeply ingrained forms of power’.³⁸ Following this, it is necessary to consider the ways in which metal asserts a resistant position in response to institutionalised forms of oppression, particularly through declarations of progressivism, liberalism and anti-fascism. Such rhetoric invokes the ‘anti-mainstream’ narrative, which shapes much early work on metal: just as much as metal’s mythology has focused on symbols of violence, horror and excess, it has also been concerned with resisting institutional oppression and control. In this way, metal’s transgression is asserted as a resistance to dominant forms of power and authority, oft-realised in quite broad terms. Gojira, in articulating their environmentalist position, argue that ‘[i]t’s a chaotic world, with an economy based on fraud, and politics based on corruption, but as ugly as the world is, we can change it’.³⁹ Positions such as this, Niall Scott claims, often emerge under the guise of metallic unity, of a unified ‘we’ who can use metal to protest the ugliness of the world.⁴⁰

This notion of a ‘metallic unity’ is particularly pertinent in light of the response of the metal community to the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly as it gained momentum in 2020.⁴¹ Many reactions from some of metal’s better-known public figures, Laina Dawes notes, have been disappointing. Dawes points to the sharing of racist conspiracy memes on social media by high-profile artists and their partners. Such actions reveal how, as Dawes’ earlier work has noted, metal scenes are ‘regularly thought of as inclusive spaces and centred on a community spirit’ but, in reality, fail to block out raced and gendered issues that exist in wider contexts.⁴² It has, then, been encouraging to see large portions of the metal world react to the Black Lives Matter protests with a commitment to anti-racist action. A particularly high-profile example emerges in Black Sabbath selling shirts with their Master of Reality logo changed to read ‘Black Lives Matter’, with all profits supporting the movement. To a more cynical eye, these actions may be read as a superficial attempt by bands to attach themselves to an enormously influential social movement; such arguments can, however, overlook the material reality of the funds raised in service of anti-racist movements by metal communities. Moreover, such a clear stand by metal’s much-mythologised originator, Black Sabbath, is a vital rejoinder to claims that metal and politics be ‘strange bedfellows’.⁴³

Such anti-racist stances are, of course, not new in metal: bands and scene members have long asserted anti-fascist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic and anti-misogynistic positions. There are myriad examples of this worldwide, from which I draw on only a few recent examples: the collective Crushing Intolerance has, across multiple releases, condemned bigotry and fascism; in Australia, Hazeen have used metal’s love of horror to respond to and mock Islamophobia; Hawai’i’s Kūka’ilimoku dedicated their music to the ‘children of Hawai’i … Death to all missionaries and rotten politicians’.⁴⁴ Metal’s anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-colonial politics have themselves unfolded in complex and multisited ways. There is, on one hand, the British folk/black metal band Dawn Ray’d, who see metal as an extenuation of folk’s roots in revolutionary narratives of a unified working class. As they argue, to be both metal and anti-fascist go hand-in-hand.⁴⁵ Nonetheless, such anti-authority positions are subject to criticism in that they can be easily appropriated into metallic fascinations with cruelty and bodily brutality, and thus may be limited in their transgressive potentiality. In her work on the self-described ‘emasculating death metal’ band Castrator, Joan Jocson-Singh responds to such charges by arguing that vigilante feminism manifesting as bodily violence acts as a form of empowerment that enables women to coexist in a liminal space so often dominated by their male counterparts.⁴⁶ This tension nevertheless demonstrates some of the persistent issues with metal’s attempts to take political stands – that often such positions potentially end up reinforcing the same forms of power they seek to destabilise and commodify dissent within the maintenance of the metallic status quo: Metal Hammer’s ‘Metal Takes a Stand’ issue,⁴⁷ which salutes ‘the bands out there who have seen their music as an instrument of social and political change for the better’, serves as a timely reminder of this tension. Of the twenty-five bands featured, only four featured women as members, and only four were from non-Western countries.

Apolitical Misanthropy

Such polarising ideological positions hence lead to the third potentiality for metallic transgression that I want to explore here: apolitical misanthropy. Within this position, metal rejects the notion of politics, and instead articulates frustration and disillusionment, which calls for the misanthropic destruction of all humanity. This misanthropy is often expressed in extreme ways – Niall Scott looks to black metal’s obsession with self-loathing, misery and the void as examples of such ‘subversive discourse’.⁴⁸ Within this third space, there emerges a conscious rejection of the ‘political’ itself, and instead a ‘determined effort to set oneself apart from the world’.⁴⁹ Misanthropic discourses are therefore often accompanied by a self-conscious elitism and contempt for humanity. Wolves in the Throne Room declare, ‘[o]ur culture has failed, we are all failures. The world around us has failed to sustain our humanity, our spirituality’.⁵⁰ These apolitical positions are nevertheless filled with tensions: when metal asserts itself against politics, it often does so with the understanding that ‘politics’ refers to affairs that concern the government and the state. As such, what ostensibly emerges as a rejection of any kind of political stance – what Niall Scott has referred to as ‘heavy metal’s great refusal’⁵¹ – may nonetheless amount to its reaffirmation.

Metal’s wider desire to be seen as apolitical can often mean that problematic material is allowed to flourish under the guise of free speech, or what Berger has called ‘radical tolerance’⁵² – of permitting even the most offensive of statements so as not to be seen as taking a side or not to engage in censorship of the music. However, as Dawes argues, ‘the things that the artists say outside of their music are the most problematic’.⁵³ For Dawes, this raises particular questions about the ways in which these ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ of metal’s transgressions can be navigated: ‘Can you separate the musician’s personal views from the music? … How do we react to offensive personal views of musicians [we] enjoy? Do we simply chalk everything up to free speech?’.⁵⁴ This question – of whether a musician’s personal actions can be separated from their music – is an ongoing tension for music communities and scholars alike. Moreover, metal’s desire to appear apolitical can often mean that the boundaries between ‘freedom of expression’ and purposeful hate messages become blurred; or that wider issues of bigotry go unaddressed in communities. This apolitical misanthropic position thus can and has been used to cloak problematic discourse in scenes, precisely by refusing to label it as such due to concerns that such overt politicisation will take away from the music.

Conclusion

Struggles over the role of the ‘(a)political’ in metal point to the ways in which scenes, and their expressions of transgression, continue to be caught up in relations of domination and power. Metal both reinforces and ameliorates power in its production of transgression. As Kahn-Harris argues, much of metal’s transgression might simply reinforce forms of oppression, which are produced by state apparatus. The transgressive logics of scenes, for Kahn-Harris, are limited in two key ways. The first is destruction; to fully experience misanthropic, antisocial nihilism, he argues, would be to kill oneself or to kill another. The second, he says, is when transgression involves a challenge to one’s own self-interest.⁵⁵ The above examples of metal’s commitment to confronting racism, sexism and fascism show the fruits to be born from such challenges to self-interest, yet also reveal the potential limits of such transgression. Metal’s ability to be truly ‘transgressive’, in this way, has often been romanticised insofar as it remains comfortable for certain groups: to call out such comfort, as Laina Dawes’ work has shown, often creates uncomfortable and unsafe environments for those who do so.

There is also, of course, the reality of commerciality and consumerism. Metal has long defined itself in opposition to mass culture and other forms of popular culture. However, at the same time, metal has been sold and expressed itself through the infrastructure of mass culture. The relationship between heavy metal and the mainstream has then ‘never been stable’; as Benjamin Earl argues, ‘this musical form finds itself constantly crossing back and forth from the subcultural to the commercial’.⁵⁶ Metal is a commodity: it has been able to distribute itself through music, fashion and lifestyle markets. As such, as scholars such as Karen Bettez Halnon have observed, to the more cynical audience, metal has never really been apolitical, subversive and culturally dangerous, but rather is simply a component within the ‘dominant spectacle … the culture industry’s commodification of dissent, rebellion being an enormously profitable, mass-marketed product of the culture industry today’.⁵⁷ Nonetheless, such cynicism could also overlook the pluralism of values and political perspectives addressed in metal, how the genre itself has responded to its own position in the culture industries, and ultimately, the affective spectacle of resistance that metal invites for its communities. Metal has offered a vital space for subaltern resistance and the articulation of anti-hegemonic discourses the world over. Perhaps a more productive future lies in continuing to re-engage with ‘transgression’ as it has emerged throughout metal’s history, particularly in light of Karl Spracklen’s argument that while metal music might be seen as a leisure space that resists the norms and values of the mainstream, it can also serve to re-affirm and construct those norms and values.⁵⁸

To return to my leading question – is it still possible for metal to be transgressive in the twenty-first century – in offering some form of conclusion, my answer is a rather frustratingly cloudy yes, no, and maybe. I think the more productive discussion to be had is not necessarily whether metal is or is not transgressive, but rather a reckoning with what ‘transgressive’ actually means in any given context, and a concurrent understanding that the focus of such rebellion has never been the same thing throughout metal’s history. What we are left with is a series of questions that will continue to evolve as metal itself does: how scenes themselves respond to transgression when challenging one’s own self-interest is not ‘comfortable’, or furthermore, how many of these political divides are starting to emerge along generational and geographic axes. Continuing to question how transgression is framed and represented, and whether metal’s rebellion is only permissible when it reassures privileged groups of their hegemonic power, can help us to radically reimagine the potential that metal was only ever born to be mild.