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.