Metal in the Middle East has been described as ‘loud, liberating and on the rise’, as a ‘political statement’ and as a musical genre that ‘feeds on revolution and change’.¹ ‘Counterculture’ and ‘resistance’ in response to repression, war and religious extremism are perhaps the most commonly used terms to delineate the role of metal in the region. Metal has also been said to represent a ‘cultural challenge to pious conservatism’² and an ‘antidote to religious extremism’.³ Against the backdrop of the wave of political upheavals that have shaken the region in recent years, metalheads have been furthermore portrayed as ‘children of the revolution’⁴ who took to the streets during the ‘Arab Spring’, the Iranian ‘Green Movement’ and the Turkish ‘Gezi Park Protests’.

A casual perusal of the growing number of publications and documentaries on metal in the Middle East might give the impression that this musical genre represents a strictly political rather than a subcultural movement. In some instances, metal is cast as a powerful countercultural force, one capable of challenging both the authoritarian state and the rise of political Islam. The significance ascribed to metal on a political and cultural level is indeed remarkable. And yet, after (re)reading some of the meticulously researched books and articles published in recent years, I have become increasingly uncomfortable about the ways in which metal in the Middle East has been presented to a wider audience.

It is this feeling of discomfort and unease that leads me to the purpose of this chapter. Its goal is to critically assess how metal in the Middle East has been seen and represented in journalism and academia. The chapter also addresses the question of who controls or contributes to the discourse on metal in the Middle East, and who is being left out or excluded. In line with these goals, this chapter conceptualises metal as a discursive formation, which carries the risk of reproducing Orientalist notions of the Middle East.

The chapter begins with a necessarily brief and incomplete summary of previous research on metal in the region. It then reflects on the influence of Orientalist discourse over the study of metal music and culture. In my opinion, this discourse has led to the politicisation and exoticisation of a particular figure – the ‘Middle Eastern’ and/or ‘Muslim metalhead’. Finally, this chapter attempts to discern specific characteristics and challenges that need to be considered when studying metal music and culture in the Middle East.

Studying Moral Panics, Acknowledging Societal Change

The origins of scholarly debate on metal in the Middle East date back to Keith Kahn-Harris’s early works on Israel’s extreme metal scene of the late 1990s.⁵ Based on extensive fieldwork in Israel, Kahn-Harris examined the dynamics and conspicuous ambivalences of identity construction among Israeli metalheads. Members of this demographic, he found, frequently considered themselves ‘marginalized’ and ‘alienated from the Zionist project’.⁶ Kahn-Harris described their situation as one of ‘double marginality’: marginal to the construction of Jewishness and national identity in Israel, and marginal to the production of metal music and culture in the world. Indeed, Kahn-Harris conducted extensive interviews with Israeli metal bands, including Azazel, Bishop of Hexen, Grimoire, Melechesh, Orphaned Land, Salem and others. Based on this empirical work, it became clear that metal was virtually invisible in both Israeli popular culture and global metal.⁷

Kahn-Harris also touched upon another issue that has frequently resurfaced in the works of other authors: moral panics over metal and Satanism. In his work, he briefly mentions that Israel’s metal scene has been subjected to media allegations of Satanism.⁸ Gabriel Cavaglion and Revital Sela-Shayovitz’s detailed analysis of Israeli newspapers further indicated that heavy metal has been central to the Israeli narrative on Satanism.⁹ They found that Israeli newspapers overwhelmingly tended to portray metal as a violent Satanic cult, as a menace to the central pillars of Judaism, and as a threat to the Zionist project. Israeli youngsters were allegedly being brainwashed into devil worship and, in the process, losing their religion.

The narrative conveyed by the Israeli media is strikingly redolent of similar moral panics over metal and Satanism in the Arab World, Turkey and Iran. Over the past three decades, the media of practically every country in this region has at some point generated a discourse around metal and Satanism. The triggers for these discourses invariably came in the form of public astonishment at the sudden spectacle of large crowds of long-haired metalheads dressed in black, or the supposedly inexplicable suicides of teenagers from wealthy families. The public visibility of metal music and culture was commonly limited to isolated events (festivals, concerts), which a broader mass audience was not accustomed to and, consequently, proved unable to decode. Metal thus assumed meaning in relation to concepts already collectively shared among a wider public, such as cultural imperialism (i.e., ‘Westernisation’) and apostasy. Satanism, by contrast, remained largely unknown, which obliged journalists, politicians and religious leaders to introduce and explain the term to their audiences. Ultimately, however, Satanism was neatly classified as yet another sign of moral dilapidation caused by Westernisation, and thus intimately associated with a wider postcolonial discourse.

Precisely such a moral panic was the focus of a paper presented by Ted Swedenburg at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco in November 2000.¹⁰ Swedenburg gave a detailed account of how a series of sensationalist reports published in Rouz Al-Yousef in November and December 1996 had triggered an unprecedented set of events that, taken together, showed all the signs of a full-scale ‘moral panic’. Rouz Al-Yousef, one of Egypt’s oldest and most venerable political news magazines, depicted a lurid scenario of widespread Satanic rituals that involved young men and women from privileged Cairene families. All of those implicated listened to heavy metal music. The papers accused the metal fans of taking drugs, engaging in illicit sexual acts, slaughtering small animals and worshipping the devil. The alleged Satan worshippers were subsequently accused of apostasy and contempt of religion, both of which constitute a criminal offence under Article 98 of the Egyptian Penal Code. Things became really serious after Nasr Farid Wasil, Egypt’s grand mufti, publicly condemned the spread of Satanism in the country. He also reportedly urged Hasan Al-Alfi, Egypt’s minister of the interior, to take immediate action and arrest the Satanists. In January 1997, the Egyptian police arrested over ninety people, and Egypt’s public prosecutor opened an official investigation. After less than two months, however, the accused Satanists were cleared and acquitted of all charges, and the panic abruptly dissipated.

Most studies on metal in the Middle East point to the outbreak of similar moral panics across the region. These studies have either analysed newspaper articles and media reports or interviewed local metalheads about the consequences of the events. It would go beyond the scope of this chapter to mention all of these studies in detail.¹¹ Moreover, I do not wish to suggest that the story of metal in the Middle East comprises nothing but an unceasing cycle of moral panics over alleged connections to Satanism. Nonetheless, I would like to provide an idea of the scale and character of the aforementioned ‘moral panics’.

For this purpose, I have chosen excerpts from two newspaper articles. The first article, published in the Turkish daily Sabah on 14 October 1990, was written by a well-known newspaper columnist named Engin Ardıç. It was responsible for the first moral panic over metal and Satanism in Turkey and provided a blueprint for countless other newspaper reports in the late 1990s and early 2000s.¹² Ardıç states the following:

The second article is taken from the Lebanese news website Al-Joumhouria. It was published on 10 January 2012, mere months before Joe Malouf, a popular Lebanese journalist and TV host, presented a sensationalist report on metal and Satanism on MTV Lebanon. The report led to a public outcry and the arrest of several local metalheads by the Lebanese police.¹⁴ The article seeks to maintain authority by lengthily quoting a Christian priest. The priest, whose name is revealed to the readers as Father Marwan Khoury, describes the evil deeds of the devil worshippers. Al-Joumhouria begins by quoting Father Marwan on how one of the devil worshippers convinced a young girl to have sex with him and bear his child:

The priest continues to unfurl his narrative by citing further unspeakable crimes:

Satan, sex, seduction, Nazism, Zionism (!), violence and child abuse. Anything goes in Engin Ardıç and Father Marwan’s fictional reports, as long as it signifies deviance, transgression and, ultimately, the representation of absolute evil. It would be tempting to dismiss all of this as laughable, were it not for the real-life consequences of such reports. The authors not only presented a list of heinous crimes, but they also listed numerous visual markers which purportedly signified Satanism in everyday life (long hair, black clothes, the sign of the horns, etc.). Those whose appearances corresponded with the aforementioned signifiers were left vulnerable to verbal and physical abuse. In the case of Ardıç’s article, this was combined with concrete political demands and a call for Islamists to take violent action. Indeed, many of the moral panics over metal and Satanism have been accompanied by human rights violations. These have included extra-judicial arrests, police brutality and, in a few cases, torture.

Generally speaking, Middle Eastern states and societies have reacted harshly toward metal music and culture. Public vilification, police repression and arrests, or the confiscation and closure of fanzines have resulted from temporary media frenzies. Nonetheless, it should be emphasised that the kind of moral panics described above commonly comprise only temporary discursive events. Usually, those arrested were released and acquitted after a short period of time in police custody, while court cases were quietly dropped, and the public rapidly lost interest. An exception to this overall trend might be the situation in Iran, and specifically, the case of the black metal band Confess. The members of this band fled Iran to evade legal prosecution over blasphemy charges.¹⁶

Generally speaking, however, the depiction of metalheads in the Middle Eastern public sphere has not been entirely negative, despite media manipulation, police repression and public polemics. Mohammad Magout, for instance, points out that the Syrian TV series Hajiz Al-Samt (The Wall of Silence) featured a gang of young men, who could easily be identified as metalheads by their long hair, metal shirts, tattoos and goatees. The TV series notably portrayed these somewhat suspicious-looking youngsters as loyal and honest friends who had simply been misjudged by society.¹⁷ Similarly, the depiction of a laughing young metalhead on a poster for the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs’ official Ramadan campaign in 2009 might be read as another example of pious conservatism’s attempted incorporation of metal. With his long hair and black Iron Maiden t-shirt, the young metalhead could be perceived as ‘transgressive’, but also as pious and kind.

This leads us to a broader point about the current status of metal in the Middle East. In short, the recurrence of moral panics has been increasingly accompanied by a slow but gradual process of normalisation and accommodation towards metal music and culture. This may not hold true for the entire Middle East. To be sure, resentment from pious conservative sections of society toward metal remains marked. Nonetheless, certain events and reactions indicate an appreciable paradigm shift. For example, June 2013 saw the passing of Zeki Ateş, the founder of Kemancı, Istanbul’s first rock and metal bar. Ateş was widely commemorated. Several major daily newspapers reported on his death, and even Kadir Topbaş, Istanbul’s mayor and a leading figure of Turkey’s pious conservative Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), sent a large bouquet of flowers to his funeral. And yet, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kemancı had been pilloried as a hotbed of Satanism. Ateş’s famous bar had provided an early stage for many of Turkey’s best-known rock artists (Şebnem Ferah, Teoman, Özlem Tekin, Duman, Aylin Aslım, Mor ve Ötesi, Pentagram, etc.).

It seems that, today, an appreciation of Turkish metal is no longer confined to Turkey’s metal community. A wider public seems readier to acknowledge the cultural (and political) value of this genre. Indeed, many ‘ordinary citizens’ now take pride in Turkey’s rock tradition and the musicians representing it. Legendary figures of Anatolian rock music, such as Barış Manço (1943–1999) or Cem Karaca (1945–2004), have long become part of Turkey’s collective memory, even among conservative sections of society. This does not mean that rock and metal music have been fully accepted by the mainstream. Rock and metal are still redolent of a secular way of life. They are thus loathed by Turkey’s pious conservative elite for providing a putative alternative to its attempt at raising a new ‘pious generation’. It is nonetheless important to point out that, today, the discursive construction of metal is very different from the discursive construction of metal twenty, thirty or even forty years ago. This is true not only of Turkey; it is certainly the case for other Middle Eastern societies.

Metal and Orientalism?

When I was first asked to write this chapter, I was hesitant to accept the offer, particularly because the very title – ‘Metal in the Middle East’ – carries serious semiotic baggage. At least since the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism in 1978,¹⁸ it is no longer possible to use terms such as ‘the Orient’ or ‘the Middle East’ innocently. Said, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, delineated an alliance between Western academic scholarship and modern imperialism. He exposed the concept of ‘the Orient’ as a European invention that had been used to legitimise European imperialist aspirations and establish ‘Western’ superiority over ‘the East’. The tradition of representing ‘the Orient’ as ignorant, backward, violent and incapable of democracy has served to essentialise and patronise the ‘Oriental other’ and to mobilise fear, hatred and disgust. Orientalism can be seen as an ideological project that imagines the Orient as Europe’s exotic but inferior adversary, one that must be tamed and dominated.

The effectiveness of Orientalism lies in the fact that the distinction between the Orient and the Occident – or, alternatively, Islam and the West – has become naturalised and part of common knowledge. Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept of the Orient became accepted by a sufficiently large number of authors as something self-evident, something that ‘goes without saying’. In this way, Orientalist thought came to provide the basis for further research and reflection on any topic or issue relationally positioned in the context of the Orient or the Middle East.

The term ‘Middle East’ also traces its roots to European imperialism and denotes a Eurocentric perspective on the world. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the term was used to designate the British zone of influence in the Levant, Mesopotamia and the Arab Peninsula, and to distinguish these territories from the ‘Far East’ – that is, East and Southeast Asia. Attempts to detach the term from its imperial provenance, to define the region according to other criteria (climate, natural boundaries, religion, culture, language, etc.), are far from convincing. Therefore, the term ‘Middle East’ must be seen as a strictly geopolitical term. It evokes the memory of a long history of foreign domination and represents a reference point for a wider postcolonial discourse about cultural domination and power.

Metal in the Middle East must thus be carefully examined within this context. This includes recognising and addressing the myriad of implications that Orientalist discourse has for scholarly research on metal in the Middle East. Orientalist discourse might influence how authors see and represent metal in the Middle East. The ‘Orientalist lens’ they unconsciously wear may colour the questions they ask and the answers they generate. To date, it is mainly scholars from Europe and North America who hold authority over the discourse on metal in the Middle East. This obvious deficit in the research agenda requires us to direct a series of critical questions at ourselves. For example, if research were conducted by scholars from the region, would they produce a different picture of metal in the Middle East? Does the research deficit identified above comprise a continuation of Orientalism in academia, or does it result solely from a lack of academic interest in metal studies in the region? By studying and presenting the histories of local metal scenes to a broader, (non-)academic audience, do metal scholars reproduce cultural representations of the Orient? Are these scholars reflective enough of how Orientalist discourse might impinge on their ways of seeing and studying local metal cultures?

It is my contention that the discourse on metal in the Middle East has been directly influenced by Orientalist discourse. This becomes obvious if we examine certain procedures of exclusion which, in my opinion, should induce us to rethink the ways in which we see and represent metal music and culture to our audiences. Some discursive strands and events have been overemphasised, while others have been excluded, or at least neglected. Examples include a consistently intensive engagement with ‘repression’ and ‘moral panic’, as well as the absence of the lives of ‘ordinary metalheads’ from many studies.

Another procedure of exclusion relates to the case studies chosen by various authors to represent metal in the Middle East. The choice of protagonists often appears to be selective and repetitive and, therefore, reductive. What I mean by this is that some bands and musicians are repeatedly quoted and referred to in various studies, while others remain largely invisible. Researchers and journalists often tend to interview and thus over-represent those who speak English and can be easily contacted on social media or met face-to-face in the European or North American diaspora.¹⁹ To date, the discourse is clearly dominated by researchers and journalists from Europe and North America. Authors from the Middle East itself play a strikingly limited role in reporting and representing local scenes and their histories. I would therefore argue that we need to reflect on how Orientalist discourse has contributed to exoticizing the ‘Muslim metalhead’, and how an examination of metal in the Middle East has helped to re-establish ‘Western’ moral superiority.

Rethinking the Exoticisation of the ‘Muslim Metalhead’

This very brief dialogue has been taken from a round-table discussion on metal in Lebanon hosted by World Metal Congress co-founders Alexander Milas and Lina Khatib. The webcast, aired on 24 November 2020, also involved Anthony Kaoteon, Derek Roddy and Kimaera’s Jean-Pierre Haddad. The latter is quoted above, responding to Milas’s opening question. But why is this ‘the most obvious question’, and why would ‘people express surprise’ about the existence of a metal scene in Lebanon? Metal in Lebanon is indeed ‘nothing new at all’, and one might wonder why metalheads from the region still have to explain themselves and prove their existence to the outside world.

From where does this surprise originate, and when will journalists and academics stop asking these ‘obvious’ questions? In reflecting on this, I returned to a scene report written thirty years ago by Luk Haas for Maximum Rocknroll. Haas had apparently spent some time in Istanbul in 1989, from where he delivered the – by his reckoning – very first scene report from Turkey. His observations came with a concert photo that depicted thrash metal veterans Metafor, a potentially racist cartoon of a stereotyped Arab attacking a punk rocker with a sword, and the contact details of several punk and thrash metal bands in Turkey (Blessfamous, Headbangers, Kronik, Metafor, Noisy Mob):

What, then, might the reader pick up from Haas’s observations? That Turkey is a hard place for underground scenes to flourish because Turkey is a Muslim country. Certainly, I am sure that many punks and metalheads who lived in Turkey at the time would agree with Haas. They would surely come forward with their own stories of how they were exposed to ‘police oppression as well as Islamic fundamentalist aggressions’. However, I would also argue that Haas’s report fulfils the expectations of a ‘Western’ audience and a worldview shaped by Orientalist discourse. The reader might well establish a meaningful connection between Islam and violence, repression, intolerance, human rights abuses and an absence of the rule of law. From this perspective, reports on metal in the Middle East contribute to and confirm existing stereotypical images of the Muslim world. But a central historical fact is apparently lost in translation in Haas’s scene report: Turkey has been a secularist state since its foundation in 1923 and is home to millions of ‘ordinary Muslim citizens’ who, for decades, have been resisting the encroachments of political Islam. And even thirty years after Haas’s report, similar lines of analysis are still being formulated. For instance, a recent article by Beth Winegarner concludes that ‘in heavily Islamic nations like Lebanon, Morocco, and Egypt, the genre’s popularity was followed by crackdowns, arrests, and government bans, leaving nascent heavy-metal communities in shreds’.²²

It seems that, for researchers and journalists who grew up in Europe and North America (including myself), punk and metal in the Middle East was something unexpected and therefore somewhat exotic. In her early work, for instance, Deena Weinstein presumed that Islam would preclude metal from gaining a foothold among Muslim youths.²³ Similarly, Mark LeVine was honest enough to admit that ‘the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise’ – whereupon he immediately reminded himself that he ‘shouldn’t have been surprised at the notion of Muslim metalheads or punkers’.²⁴ Furthermore, I sometimes cannot escape the feeling that particular reports on metal in the Middle East read like the story of the discovery of an exotic new world, one in need of ‘revelation’ to a ‘Western’ audience.

Anecdotal Evidence?

Much of the existing literature on metal in the Middle East builds on anecdotal evidence. Metal scholars often compose their studies as a sequence of anecdotal encounters with local metalheads. The interviewees invariably retell the legends of particular discursive events (a ‘legendary’ concert, a police raid, etc.) that have shaped the collective memory of a local scene. This is usually reinforced by accumulating first- or second-hand observations and a certain degree of socio-political contextualisation. To be sure, anecdotal evidence combined with frequent eye-witness accounts provides a sense of authenticity and commonly resonates strongly with metalheads around the world. However, it often lacks analytical substance, not only regarding the empirical material laid out in a particular study but to the positionality of the metal scholar involved in its accumulation.

With that said, I will now lay out a few of my own anecdotal encounters. This is not a (potentially ridiculous) attempt to prove my ‘street credibility’ as a seasoned metal scholar in the Middle East. The goal here is to critically reflect on how I have approached the field. As the reader will quickly notice, these anecdotes tell us less about metal in the Middle East than about my own positionality.

In the summer of 1996, a friend and I decided to go backpacking through Egypt. It quickly turned out that our rather naïve concept of backpacking was not well-established in Egypt. After two-and-a-half weeks, we were sick, tired, confused and unable to decode much of the buzzing society around us. I neither understood the pervasive and mostly friendly interest of ordinary people, nor the hatred and overt racism we encountered on several occasions. Above all, I will never forget the shocked expression on the face of a local butcher who caught our eye when we were getting off a bus in the town of Rasheed (Rosetta). He literally froze, the cleaver he had been chopping meat with still raised over his head. Two white, long-haired guys wearing black clothes and Doc Martens probably presented our butcher with his own problems in decoding.

In 1996, it was relatively uncommon to see men with long hair and black clothes on the streets of a small Egyptian town. The only artefact that pointed to the existence of a local metal scene was a bootleg cassette of Pantera’s The Great Southern Trendkill (1996), which I discovered while flipping through the display of a local street vendor in downtown Cairo. The street vendor, a young guy in his early twenties, was generous enough to play the tape on my request. To my regret, the sudden blast of sound that emerged from the cassette player made him frantically hit the stop button and terminate the ‘noise’ as quickly as possible.

I visited Istanbul for the first time in the spring of 2002 due to a stopover that allowed me to roam the city for a few days. My first walk led me directly along İstiklal Caddesi, Istanbul’s famous pedestrian shopping road and the modern heart of the city. At this time, Slayer’s God Hates Us All (2001) album was officially released and promoted in Turkey. The release of foreign rock albums was quite common at the time, but the release dates often came with a delay of several months. On that particular day in 2002, God Hates Us All was ‘everywhere’. Posters advertised the album release, and a book and record store at the centre of İstiklal Caddesi blasted the title song out into the street. Several small music stores located around Tünel Square had electric guitars, amplifiers and, of course, a variety of the renowned Istanbul Agop and Istanbul Mehmet Cymbals on display. The impression of a vivid and well-established metal scene was provided by a plethora of small rock bars and the presence of numerous rockers and metalheads, with their long hair, boots and black shirts overtly signifying their ‘metalness’.

My experience in Turkey was dramatically different from my experiences in Egypt, Syria or Morocco. Why, then, would I feel justified in drawing some kind of connection between these countries and their local scenes? Because they are referred to as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Middle Eastern’ in ‘the West?’ I am sure that most of my friends in Turkey would loathe the idea of being classified as Middle Eastern. Indeed, the history of Turkey could be written as a European history.

A few years later, I convinced some friends to join me on a trip to Istanbul’s Ümraniye district. At this time, Ümraniye had the reputation of being a run-down, working-class neighbourhood dominated by pious conservatives – an unsafe place for long-haired metalheads. Only a few days earlier, I had interviewed a local black metalhead from Ümraniye, who told me about the daily fights and conflicts he encountered. And indeed, my friends, who had all grown up in middle-class families, had never visited Ümraniye. They initially ridiculed and rejected my idea (‘They’ll kill us!’). In the end, no one got killed, and we had a lovely encounter with a socialist family that invited us to their home. Most of the people on the streets simply ignored us. However, when we were on our way back to the minibus, we had to dodge out of the way of a middle-aged woman and her young daughter. The former briefly stared at us, especially at my friend Zehra, with her long, black dreadlocks and black leather jacket. Then she very audibly hissed the word ‘Satanist’.

The woman’s reaction indicates that popular media discourses had indeed influenced the public perception of rockers and metalheads in Turkey. Her reaction also made me aware of the fact that metal was an issue of social class. ‘Ordinary people’ commonly associated metal and Satanism with supposedly rich kids from secularist families. Certainly, to some extent, metal music was also popular among young men and women from working-class backgrounds. However, I generally found it difficult to get in touch with them. Social class set a boundary between metalheads, simply because not everyone had the money or leisure time to visit a rock bar or concert. Consequently, well-educated metalheads from middle-class families were over-represented in my research. This surely holds true for other studies on metal in the Middle East.

Language and cultural knowledge were also key issues here: Do I speak the language(s) well enough to understand and analyse texts, conversations and social encounters in daily life? And how reliable and potentially Orientalist does this make my own research?

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to point out five aspects that, in my opinion, pose a challenge to metal in the Middle East:

1. (1) Metal in the Middle East has always found itself at the peripheries of global metal. Participation in global metal has been limited due to a digital and economic divide. To be sure, the advent of the internet and the invention of new and cheaper recording and communication technologies (social media applications, audio recording software, etc.) have contributed to narrowing this gap. Even so, international travel restrictions or unfavourable currency exchange rates still pose a challenge to metalheads in the Middle East. Festivals in Europe or North America are mostly out of reach, and bands have difficulties organising gigs abroad.

2. (2) All local metal scenes in the Middle East have one thing in common: they are situated in religionormative societies. Religionormativity denotes a situation in which being religious and believing in a particular god or gods represents the commonly accepted norm. Religionormativity also comes with particular societal expectations. The individual is commonly expected to respect religious values and act accordingly. Non-religious persons are often discriminated against and marginalised, especially when the legal system happens to be aligned with religious principles. In the Middle East, metalheads have been branded as un-Islamic, un-Christian or un-Jewish. They have been accused of undermining the ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ spirit of the religiously imagined nation. Doing metal in religionormative environments thus often triggers negative reactions from ‘ordinary believers’, who consider their religious beliefs to be disrespected. Drinking alcohol in public, criticising religious teachings or dignitaries or incorporating (anti)religious symbols into lyrics and artwork constitute a contestation of religious norms.

3. (3) The collapse of pro-democracy movements throughout the Middle East (Egypt, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, etc.) has given rise to authoritarian populist regimes that threaten the freedom of artistic and individual expression, not only in metal but in all fields of popular culture.

4. (4) The ways of seeing and representing metal in the Middle East have been affected by Orientalist discourse. Consequently, it could be argued that studies on metal in the Middle East help to reproduce Orientalist representations of the past and re-establish ‘Western’ superiority over the ‘Muslim world’.

5. (5) Within postcolonial discourse, metal music and culture are often considered to represent a form of cultural imperialism. This position has been common among representatives of political Islam, but it is also held by nationalist and socialist groups. A metalhead who was actively involved in Turkey’s socialist movement once told me that he had temporarily stopped listening to metal because he and his comrades saw it as a representation of Western imperialism. Part of this postcolonial discourse is to imagine a nation’s ‘authentic self’ in distinction from what is considered ‘Western’ and therefore intrusive. The appropriation of ‘Western’ popular culture is seen as an act of self-colonisation and surrender to Western values. In this context, doing metal appears alien, even hostile, an act that needs to be denied an active presence in the public sphere and eradicated from national memory. The attempt to reinvent the supposedly authentic culture of a nation corrupted by Western imperialism is arguably as essentialist and paternalistic as Western Orientalism. Indeed, Edward W. Said himself once described this phenomenon as ‘Orientalism in reverse’ or, using the medical suffix -osis to signify a sickness, ‘Occidentosis’.²⁵ The whole debate on Westernisation fails to recognise that metal and other forms of popular culture are not just passively ‘copied’; they are renegotiated, reshaped, ‘authenticised’, and thus integrated into local and individual identities.

Of his band’s Japanese admirers, Testament’s Alex Skolnick writes:

There are many possible reasons for metal’s extraordinary popularity in Asia – and this chapter reviews some of them – but perhaps it is as simple as this ability to convey musical meaning across cultural boundaries.

Whatever the causes, metal’s popularity in Asia is a social fact. While metal music is occasionally dismissed (even haughtily so) in the United States as nostalgic ‘dad rock’ or marginal esoterica for self-selecting elitists, in Asia the genre has remained vital, and its popularity appears to be growing. Composed of tens of millions of avid enthusiasts, the Asian metal music scene is an increasingly interconnected territory that has forged ties to other world regions through its most successful, distinctive-sounding groups, including Chthonic from Taiwan, Burgerkill, Seringai and Voice of Baceprot from Indonesia, Rudra from Singapore, The Hu Band from Mongolia, Bloodywood from India, and Babymetal from Japan. While it would not be inaccurate to state that online platforms enabled the global conquest of these bands, such an assertion would also be incomplete – even facile. The emergence of viable local music scenes and the culmination of a painstaking decades-long process of metal indigenisation were also necessary prerequisites for this success. In order to make an impact on the global scene, Asian metal acts also had to overcome Westerner listeners’ resistance to Asian musics, a dismissal rooted in long-enduring colonial and racist stereotypes.² Among these stereotypes, as students of postcolonial theory are well aware, is the offensive notion that Asians are weak and emasculated compared to white Europeans. Thus the ability of Asian people, especially young Asian women, to master a music genre that extols strength and power is consequential within the larger history of cultural representations. The following survey of metal music in Asia assesses major developments since the genre’s 1970s introduction to the region by focusing on three contemporary, internationally acclaimed artists. There are obviously many other important groups representing every imaginable metal subgenre, but our present purposes will be served by these few examples.

Historical Background and Overview

Foreign popular musics, from Christian hymns to tangoes, have influenced local musical life in Asia for centuries; this intensified following the global dispersion of American jazz recordings in the early twentieth century.³ Following post-WWII decolonisation, fledgling Asian governments decried Western popular music as a corrosive cultural pollutant,⁴ resulting in a climate in which metal music was not only oppositional in a broad sense (the genre’s conventional trafficking in transgressive imagery, sounds and behaviours) but specifically in that enthusiasm for metal culture became unavoidably anti-government and anti-censorship. While metal music’s foreignness and racial otherness were at first barriers to its wholesale adoption, Asian metallers were inspired by Sepultura from Brazil, proof that metal could thrive in the non-Anglophone Third World, and Death Angel, a thrash metal band from the San Francisco Bay Area composed of Filipino cousins, taken as proof that Asians could play this music too. Many also knew of the partial Asian ancestries of Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett (Filipino) and Eddie and Alex Van Halen (Indonesian).

Along with punk, hardcore and underground hip hop, metal is a form of Extreme Youth Music that has transformed the global musical and political landscape over the last fifty years.⁵ In the contemporary milieu, massive, long-established metal scenes in Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Nepal exert influence on rapidly expanding ones in India, China, mainland Southeast Asia and other regions on the continent. Japan is home to Asia’s oldest metal community, with Loudness and EZO its best-known 1980s exports, and metal labels are powerful enough to even sign bands from other countries.⁶ Though men are still the majority, Japan is the world’s most gender-balanced metal scene; this is likely due to the popularity of visual kei, a national hard rock genre with an ardent audience of mostly Japanese women.⁷ The connected metal scenes in the adjoining Southeast Asian nations of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore⁸ can trace their roots to the popularity of hard rock music in the region in the 1970s and 1980s⁹ but accelerated in the 1990s as underground networks of bands, gigs and DIY cassettes sprang up with links to the global tape-trading underground.¹⁰ This ‘Nusantara’ metal scene has produced bands representing every subgenre, from the atmospheric black metal of Jakarta’s Vallendusk to the traditional thrash of Shah Alam’s Cromok. Elsewhere in Asia, the megacity of Kathmandu became the epicentre of a massive Nepalese metal scene, with bands such as Cobweb and Ugra Karma,¹¹ while a smaller, tightly-knit metal scene arose in Bangladesh centred on the capital city of Dhaka.¹² Nascent scenes in Burma¹³ and other mainland Southeast Asian nations, China¹⁴ and the Indian subcontinent constitute fertile zones for future metal development. There has been little scholarly research on metal scenes in Central Asia, yet the region has produced some excellent groups, including Kazakhstan’s Aldaspan and Azerbaijan’s Violet Cold.

In recent years, awareness of other scenes within the region has increased, with more collaborative ventures undertaken. Founded in 2015 by Hong Kong musician Riz Farooqi, the website Unite Asia is a centralised source for information about Asian punk and metal bands. In October 2021, Unite Asia and other outlets announced that the early albums of the Singaporean ‘Vedic metal’ band Rudra, whose pathbreaking compositions combine Indian classical music and Hindu sacred texts with dissonant extreme metal,¹⁵ were being re-released by the Chinese independent metal label Awakening Records.

As of this writing, such cross-regional collaborations are still uncommon, but their frequency is increasing as linguistic and logistical obstacles fall away.

The Metallification of Asian Music

I have written of four necessary steps in the integration of an Anglo-American popular music genre into a non-English-speaking country¹⁷: In the first stage, bands play English-language covers of songs by their favourite metal groups. Any original material in this stage is also performed in English to sound like the original source material. Bands who stay at this stage can develop reputations in the local concert circuit but do not record albums and usually do not have nationwide profiles.

The second stage is characterised by linguistic hybridity, in which metal bands devise ways to deploy the national language in metal contexts. Once this difficult hurdle has been cleared, bands become commercially viable to national recording industries, and their members can pursue music careers. The Chinese band Tang Dynasty, whose classic heavy metal debut was one of the most commercially successful albums in 1990s China, is a good example of this second stage. So are legendary Indonesian bands Burgerkill and Seringai, who combine virtuosic musicianship, intense drive and a range of twentieth-century heavy metal influences with a deep engagement with Indonesian society and politics.

The Taiwanese band Chthonic, formed in 1995 in Taipei and one of the most politically active metal groups in the world, represent the pinnacle of the third stage, that of musical hybridity. While Tang Dynasty used traditional Chinese music in song intros and interludes, Chthonic developed a unique form of folk metal¹⁸ that combines the erhu (Chinese spike fiddle), called hena in Taiwan, with death, black and symphonic metal. Other East Asian stringed instruments such as the Japanese koto and the yueqin (Chinese moon lute) are added to song textures as well. Chthonic are well known for their outspoken support of Taiwan’s independence from mainland China. After the pro-democracy, youth-driven Sunflower Movement dramatically reversed a long trend in Taiwanese politics toward assimilation into mainland China, lead singer Freddie Lim, previously chair of the local Amnesty International chapter, gained a parliamentary seat in 2016 as a member of the pro-independence New Power Party.

Chthonic are quite popular in their home country, despite the extremity of their sound. Due to the success of the nation of Taiwan in controlling the Coronavirus, Chthonic have been able to play large concerts on their home turf, attracting thousands of masked spectators. The band’s CD recording of their massive 27 March 2021 concert in Takao, Taiwan, which is shipped in a box with customised face masks, a hand sanitiser bottle and a face mask chain, attests to their continuing appeal to young Taiwanese.

While Chthonic now also enjoy an enthusiastic global audience, this was built slowly over the twenty-five years of the band’s existence. The remainder of this chapter will discuss two groups that exemplify even better the fourth stage of genre indigenisation: the phase of internationalisation, when a band’s unique sound attracts a global audience. The two bands, Babymetal and Voice of Baceprot, were founded more recently, and while their composition is unusual, they both exemplify this phase.

Enter Babymetal

Babymetal, whose name rhymes with the Japanese pronunciation of ‘heavy metal’, were created in 2010 by a Japanese record producer (Kei Kobayashi, later known as ‘Kobametal’) out of a subgroup of a school-themed pop idol collective called Sakura Gakuin (Cherry Blossom Academy). The group, three teenaged singer-dancers backed by experienced session players and programmed accompaniment, performed an audacious amalgam of chirpy J-pop and thrash/death metal, a combination that took many by surprise and was widely thought at first to be nothing more than a bizarre novelty. Indeed, at one time, the success of Babymetal in the international metal arena would have seemed improbable, since by featuring Japanese teenagers in a clearly manufactured pop group, Babymetal appeared to violate so many of the sacrosanct genre rules of metal.¹⁹ Yet Babymetal now play to packed stadiums around the world and are featured regularly in major metal magazines such as Revolver and Metal Hammer, the latter featuring the two remaining members of the group (Suzuka Nakamoto [‘Su-metal’] and Moa Kikuchi [‘Moa-metal’]) on the cover of its July 2021 issue, marking the band’s tenth anniversary. In the words of staff writer Stephen Hill, ‘A decade on from their inception, Babymetal’s mix of hyperactive J-pop, brutal riffs and heavy metal bombast has seen them sell out arenas, stun major festivals, conquer the mainstream, befriend legends of the genre and make some members of Hammer’s Facebook page throw proper toddler tantrums’.²⁰ One reason for their success, controversial though it may be, is that the energetic synthesis of pop music and death metal Babymetal wound up performing by their second album was really a form of power metal, a subgenre that already existed in the metal pantheon, a subgenre that combines uplifting, melodic songs of self-empowerment, often employing Mixolydian or Ionian modes, with churning extreme-metal riffs.

To the Babymetal story I have two additional observations. First, the basic pattern of singer flanked by two backup dancers has strong East Asian antecedents. The Korean superstar and popular music trailblazer Seo Taiji, who started his career as a heavy metal bass player, was the first artist to have two hype dancers and perform intricate pop-music choreography to speed metal²¹ – Babymetal is really just following in their footsteps. Furthermore, since they combine metal with a national style of music (J-pop) and sing mostly but not exclusively in their national tongue, Babymetal could be viewed as the world’s most commercially successful folk metal band.

Second, as Lorraine Plourde has observed, Babymetal can be said to epitomise the Japanese ideal of kawaii, loosely translated as ‘cute’.²² Yet this is a version of cuteness that includes the concealed menace of that which is coded as harmless and feminine (such as a kitten’s sharp claws and teeth). As stated above, much of Asian heavy metal’s aesthetic potency in the West derives from its capacity to overcome Orientalist expectations. The sight and sound of young Asian women mastering a powerful style of music confounds underestimations born of anti-Asian, ageist and sexist bias, rendering such performances compelling and memorable. And thus there is now a whole metal subgenre pioneered by Babymetal: kawaii metal.

Even before Babymetal’s massive global popularity (for example, as the first Asian act to top the Billboard Rock Chart in 2019, it is the most popular Japanese band in the history of the United States), there was no shortage of Japanese women metal artists who play their own instruments, including in bands on the most extreme end of the spectrum. Contemporary groups include Aldious, Bridear, Gallhammer, Hagane and the veteran grindcore group Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation. Yet the group of young woman metal musicians who eventually captured the Western media’s imagination came not from Japan but from Asia’s other massive metal scene, Indonesia, which has its own proud history of female participation.

Voice of Baceprot: The Future of Metal Is Now

‘Move Over, Babymetal’ announces the title of an article in online fansite The Mary Sue, ‘Indonesian All-Girl Metal Band Voice of Baceprot Is Here to Rock’.²³ Originally from a rural village approximately 20 kilometres outside the town of Garut, West Java, the members of Voice of Baceprot (roughly, ‘chatterbox’), singer/guitarist Firdda Kurnia (Marsya), bassist Nidi Rahmawati (Widi) and drummer Euis Siti Aisyah (Sitti), have been celebrated for their instrumental virtuosity and their willingness to challenge entrenched expectations regarding gender, religiosity and metal performance. The trio, who all wear the Muslim headscarf that is typical modest attire of village women in West Java, was first introduced to metal by their music teacher, who eventually became the band’s manager, Cep Ersa Eka Susila (known as Abah). Significantly, Abah is, unlike Kobametal, less of a Svengali figure and more of a facilitator/collaborator; when the group toured Europe for the first time in the fall of 2021, he stayed behind.

Voice of Baceprot play an aggressive amalgam of thrash and nu metal; the bands the three musicians mention most often in interviews as influences are Gojira, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sepultura, Slipknot and System of a Down. They are quite adept at their instruments, and their skill level individually and collectively is far above most ensembles twice their age. Voice of Baceprot have received a great deal of attention from Western media outlets, but in fact headscarf-wearing Muslim women playing heavy metal are not that unusual in Indonesia. Vocalist Asri Yuniar (Achie) of Gugat, virtuoso guitarist Meliana Siti Sumartini and drummer Siti Nurjanah of Soul of Slamming are some of the best-known figures currently in the scene. Moreover, the vast Indonesia metal scene is a place where countless women of varying degrees of adherence to Islamic practice (and female members of non-Muslim minorities) have long found avenues of self-expression.

Generally, the stages of music genre adoption slowly build on each other over decades, but because they are such a new band, Voice of Baceprot encapsulate all four at once: they still perform English-language covers, they play original songs in a combination of Indonesian and English, and recently they even debuted an instrumental based on the Sundanese pentatonic scale. Finally, of course, they have definitely impacted the international scene. The group have yet to record a whole album of original material but have already been covered by National Public Radio (US), The Guardian (UK), The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), the New York Times and the international metal music press. While this chapter was being completed, the trio finished their first European tour (Covid-19 notwithstanding, though they had to cancel a few dates) and seems poised to win increasing numbers of fans overseas.

While touring Europe, the members of Voice of Baceprot were surprised and somewhat dismayed to encounter so many interviewers’ questions about their headscarves rather than their music. Since Europeans are more familiar with Middle Eastern Islam and the perennial conflicts between fundamentalist religion and heavy metal,²⁴ it is not surprising that they would not grasp the nuances of the Indonesian situation. Though Voice of Baceprot have certainly encountered staunch opposition from conservative religious forces in their own country, Islam itself is not regarded as problematic by most Indonesian metalheads, as opposed to certain strict, intolerant interpretations of it. In fact, numerous commentators, including Islamic scholars, have held up the members of Voice of Baceprot as religious and feminist role models for fellow Indonesians.²⁵ The trio have also received a great deal of support from members of Indonesia’s longstanding metal scene, including Stevie Item from death metal supergroup DeadSquad²⁶ and Stephen Santoso from the traditional metal band Musikimia.

Conclusion

Heavy metal has a long history in Asia. After first entering the region surreptitiously, in the form of rare and frequently unauthorised recordings, the music is now performed regularly by local groups and, while still not a mainstay of popular entertainment, is easily accessible through the internet.

As the social disruptions of neoliberal capitalist development and proletarianization of nonaffluent classes progresses in Asian nations, metal music only increases in appeal for those marginalised by modernity’s depredations, with the music’s ability to express the strong emotions that attend social upheaval, ethical unmoorings, and the psychic wounds of increasing and conspicuous economic inequality. At the same time, the emergence of unique Asian metal ‘alloys’ has caught the attention of the international metal scene. Asian metal studies is not yet a recognised subfield, but it is only a matter of time.

As Asian bands have attracted the enthusiastic attention of international audiences, they have compelled a shift in dominant representations of Asian musics, which in the West have either been dismissed as boringly derivative, inauthentic pop or abstruse traditional styles inaccessible to non-Asian ears. Asian metal is decidedly neither, and its hold upon the imagination of the global music scene has arguably just begun. This chapter has argued that in order to understand Asia’s best-known metal exports, it is crucial to learn about the vibrant scenes from which they came.

Once referred to as metal music’s ‘last frontier’,¹ Africa’s entry into the heavy metal dialogue is reflective of this genre’s universal appeal. Its arrival in the African continent has come as no surprise to headbangers, who have grown aware of the genre’s reach in recent decades through internet chat rooms and social media platforms that have allowed for an international dialogue between fans. But how has metal music been able to successfully establish itself in the African continent?

This chapter will discuss sub-Saharan Africa’s entrance into the rock and metal world. Because heavy metal’s presence on the nations of North Africa has been detailed elsewhere,² I have chosen to focus my work primarily on sub-Saharan Africa. Whether in Madagascar, South Africa, Kenya or the budding scenes in West Africa, African metal stories reflect economic and political challenges that Westerners have likely never encountered. Metal’s expansion into Africa has not only been validated by fervent fanbases in at least a dozen countries, but it has also been solidified by the establishment of national scenes producing bands, original recordings, record labels and media that cater to this specific industry, as well as the ever-increasing presence of metal festivals.

Overview of Metal in Africa

The countries where metal has found itself situated are those with strong colonial experiences and where connections to the former colonial country remain by way of imports of goods and culture. Though I would not argue that the colonial presence introduced rock music into Africa, what connects the threads more apparently is the direct link that colonialism has established to Europe for Africans in the form of stronger expatriate communities within and outside of Africa and the linguistic links that stem from this era.

Before metal scenes were born, a culture of rock music established itself quite well in the African continent. Different regions, in fact, had budding scenes that began to form after the Second World War in the lead-up to the continent’s independence movements. Notable scenes sprouted in Kenya, South Africa, Somalia, Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Guitar-driven music, whether infusing the revered tones of American blues or the ‘fuzzy’ psychedelic sounds that enamoured Western audiences in the 1960s and 1970s, was nothing out of place in a continent that has long celebrated chordophones. As Michael E. Veal notes, ‘sub-Saharan Africa has in fact been one of the world’s richest spheres of guitar playing since World War II’,³ adding the instrument’s history in the continent⁴ ‘has been a prismatic, syncretic dialogue between Western popular music and indigenous musical traditions’.⁵

Whether it was through the exposure to the music that Africans who served in the war brought home, or by way of imports and radio play, American artists such as Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley were introduced to the continent to the same fanfare they enjoyed at home and in Europe. Perhaps the continent’s most recognisable rock and metal scene today belongs to South Africa, whose introduction to rock music came by way of media exposure – with one exception: Black artists were not granted the same exposure as white artists as a result of the nation’s policy of segregation known as apartheid. Thus, some of rock’s notable artists that preceded the names mentioned above, such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard, did not enjoy the same success in South Africa as their white peers.⁶

Elsewhere in Southern Africa, the nation of Zambia enjoyed a successful psychedelic-inspired rock scene that emerged in the years following the nation’s independence and was known as Zamrock. This style of ‘fuzzy-rock’, also known as kalindula, is a ‘distinct musical style, (that) typically features a lead funky/fuzzy electric guitar and a rock/rumba beat mixing English and local languages’.⁷ Following an economic crisis that hit Zambia during the late 1970s, Zamrock left the collective conscious until a rejuvenated interest sparked by the re-releasing of the seminal albums of the era and a feature documentary in the 2010s reignited this music’s memory.⁸

In Kenya, too, during the decades that followed the Second World War, the country was enjoying a rich array of guitar-led music.⁹ Further, musicians in the country enjoyed the opportunity to perform and release original music through a budding recording industry that included famed labels His Majesty’s Voice and Equator Records. Noted musicians from this era included guitarists Daudi Kabaka and Fundi Konde – often cited as the first electric guitar players in East Africa – and later the fuzzy, psychedelic sounds of Black Savage, one of the country’s earliest rock bands.¹⁰ However, the government’s grip on political subversions, along with economic difficulties that plagued the country throughout the 1980s and 1990s, greatly affected the aspirations of musicians.

North of Kenya, the nation of Somalia also enjoyed a vibrant music scene between the 1960s and 1980s, highlighted by the vibrant nightlife and venues that featured an array of funk, jazz and rock artists in what was known as the country’s ‘golden age’.¹¹ Sadly, the nation’s perilous fall into a failed state has provided deleterious and nearly dangerous conditions for a rock or metal scene to exist in the country today. However, with regional shifts toward democratisation, only time will tell if the conditions for a new cultural revolution are in place.

On the opposite side of the continent, the region of West Africa has also seen once vibrant scenes disappear as a result of political and economic matters. Nigeria once housed a rich rock scene that saw acts such as Semi Colon, The Funkees, The Hykkers and Grotto¹² garner national fame. With rock’s introduction to Nigeria in the 1960s by way of the film Rock Around the Clock,¹³ the scene continued through the nation’s civil war before fading from collective memory in the late 1970s.¹⁴ Psychedelic rock also influenced acts in Ghana in the years following independence, notably the band Magic Aliens,¹⁵ who drew influence from acts such as Jimi Hendrix and Cream.

Metal’s entrance into sub-Saharan Africa in many ways follows the genre’s trajectory in the West and was itself a natural evolution out of national rock scenes that were well-cemented in the 1970s. The music spread through an array of international magazines or cassette trading that circulated throughout Africa by way of expatriate and ‘pen pal’ exchanges, which was a common practice in the 1980s and early 1990s, allowing fans the opportunity to hear the music of Western bands. In the following decades, the internet and file sharing replaced this practice, greatly accelerating the spread of metal into new countries.

With the establishment of scenes throughout various periods of development and political uncertainty in Africa, a diverse swath of acts has been able to navigate through an assortment of troubled waters and have survived dictatorships in Zimbabwe, authoritarian rule in South Africa and Kenya, overwhelming poverty in Madagascar, and a brutal civil war in Angola. Other nations with well-established metal scenes also include those with varied political circumstances, such as the single-party-led Togo, war-torn Mozambique and the African success stories of Botswana and Mauritius.

Within sub-Saharan Africa, metal has placed itself prominently within four regions: Southern Africa, East Africa, West Africa and the Indian Ocean islands. Though the continent’s Sahel regions boast of a proud history of guitar-driven music within Tuareg communities, the existing scene in the region sees only a handful of acts. Further, the region of Central Africa, which includes the nations of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), have little rock or metal to report as of this writing, likely because of ongoing conflicts in the region, infectious poverty, derelict living conditions and ever-present low levels of health and education. Rock and metal scenes are likelier to be found within a ‘metacultural context of modernity’¹⁶ in nations that enjoy better political and economic stability,¹⁷ and support an infrastructure that maintains an exchange of goods between Western countries, as well as steady electricity and internet connection.

But, as I note in the following sections, rock and metal’s arrival into the African continent is not uniform throughout as the genres unfolded during different periods in different countries under different circumstances. And many scenes have come to life in spite of the various difficulties that citizens in African nations face, both political and economic. Metal’s reach has shown that this music can speak to anyone, regardless of identity, because of its own brutal honesty and the unquestionable fervour that it invokes among its fans.

Southern Africa

The nation of South Africa has established a powerhouse scene that includes international touring acts and is also steadily receiving professional touring acts from the West. As a result of this country’s success with rock and metal, regional nations, including Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe, were able to benefit from South Africa’s musical infrastructure, as acts from the country were able to influence others in regional states through various transmissions, notably radio signals and expatriate communities that tethered to South Africa’s economy for employment and educational opportunities. South Africa’s metal scene, however, ascended through one of the more tumultuous periods in modern history: apartheid.

A policy of racial segregation that was implemented in 1948, apartheid saw the nation’s white minority population control the nation’s economy and land ownership. South Africa’s non-white majority were not granted the same rights of citizenry as their white counterparts, nor did they benefit from the economy equally, which is still felt today, as the country remains one of the more unequal societies in the world.¹⁸ Authoritarianism affected musicians and artists through an aggressive police state and a censorship board that monitored what music was being consumed and imported into the country through the Publications Act of 1974.¹⁹ Apartheid further ostracised the country politically and economically through the various sanctions by the world’s economic powers.

Provided the difficulties of forming a metal scene under an authoritarian rule that monitored the activities of musicians no longer a part of the nation’s identity, post-apartheid South Africa has now become home to the largest and most successful metal scene in the African continent, which boasts of acts that have not only released albums internationally but also performed outside of the continent, including Groinchurn, Voice of Destruction and Vulvodynia. South Africa has also benefitted from an international touring economy, allowing local bands the opportunity to engage in the transfer of musical and industry acumen between Western acts.

One nation that has become synonymous with metal music in Africa is Botswana. This sparsely populated, landlocked nation that borders South Africa has benefitted from the access provided by that nation’s radio stations and accessible border crossings. It has become home to a metal scene that is the most documented of all of Africa, receiving coverage from media outlets such as CNN,²⁰ The BBC,²¹ The Guardian,²² Metal Hammer,²³ The Wall Street Journal,²⁴ and has been the subject of various documentaries.²⁵ Much of the attention focused on this scene, though, is on the local fan culture, which is marked by the presence of leather and outrageous – at times gaudy – props that include swinging chains, wooden guns, animal skulls and head-to-toe studded leather dresses. Fans in Botswana are also known to display hyperbolic behaviour, whether through their full-body handshakes or exaggerated sauntering that has been the focal point of the international press.

Much like their southern neighbours, the scene in Botswana traces its origins to the 1970s with the formation of the country’s first rock band Nosey Road. By way of this influence, Botswana’s first metal act, Metal Orizon, formed in the early 1990s, followed the path set by Nosey Road and performed original music marked by their heavier European influences. In the years since, acts such as STANE, Remuda, Dust N’ Fire, Raven In Flesh, Overthrust, Wrust, and Skinflint have helped put Botswana’s metal scene on the international map – with the latter three having performed outside of the continent, in both Europe and the United States.

With the international imprint being made by these two nations, nearby nations have also seen metal scenes come into existence to varying degrees, regardless of their political and economic circumstances. Known for its stability, Namibia’s scene has kept a low profile in relation to its neighbours. Highlighted by two seminal acts, subMission and Arcana XXII, as well as rockers Penilane, the country has hosted various touring acts from within and outside of the continent, even staging its own metal festival in the national capital, the Windhoek Metal Festival, which attracted bands from neighbouring countries and the United States.

The nations of Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique highlight metal music’s tenacity as the preferred music for those reaching for an art form that best articulates their lived experiences through tumultuous circumstances, notably the latter two, whose scenes have come into being on the heels of devastating civil wars. Though the two lusophone nations are on opposite sides of the continent, both experienced similarities between their conflicts, leaving an emotionally scarred generation to navigate a new identity. Angola’s civil war ended after 27 years in 2002, leaving over half a million dead, according to the United Nations.²⁶ It was from these ashes of devastation that a generation searching for their own hope gravitated toward heavy metal as part of their efforts to confront their new post-war surroundings, including the pummelling metalcore of Before Crush and the thrash-tainted sounds of Dor Fantasma. The country’s first-ever metal festival was documented in the film Death Metal Angola.²⁷

Mozambique’s nascent metal generation also grew up sheltering from the sounds of gunfire and bombs and has adopted the thunderous sounds of metal to best reflect the process of healing. The civil war that ravaged the country for fifteen years officially ended in 1992, having taken nearly one million lives,²⁸ yet sporadic conflict did not see the warring factions reaching peace until 2019.²⁹ Under these circumstances, which are documented in the film Terra Pesada: An Unexpected Documentary,³⁰ bands such as the extreme Morghelarisy, groove-influenced Mikaya and the metalcore act Damning Cloudiness have performed and recorded original music, with some acts garnering exposure in neighbouring South Africa.

Formed in 2012, the Afro-groove of Zimbabwe’s Dividing The Element has ignited this country’s small metal scene. What sets them apart from other regional acts is their alacrity in performing in the dominant local language Shona,³¹ an indication to metal fans that they are a band riding their Western influences while paying respect to their nation’s musical history. Dividing The Element’s existence in a country that has suffered through one of the more nefarious leaderships in the twentieth century, marked by record-setting inflation, disastrous poverty, nefarious land grabs and a well-documented intolerance for political dissent, has proven a remarkable resilience for a band existing in a country whose musicians are better known for their lives in exile than in their home.

Metal’s place in Southern Africa shows that through resilience and determination, metal can reach fans longing for a voice that pushes down restrictive barriers because ‘heavy metal can promote values in opposition to dominant power structures and damaging hegemonies such as oppression, restricting freedoms of expression, racism and sexism and thus also addresses political issues’,³² that would need to be addressed for the sake of building not only a scene but also a nation.

East Africa

Much like their counterparts in South Africa, Kenyan metal fans have similarly seen their scene develop while confronting authoritarianism and state-sanctioned censorship. For Kenyans, the 2002 election, the first to be held without Daniel arap Moi, the strong-armed president who had led Kenya since 1978, set the country free of its authoritarian leadership. The scene, primarily centred in the capital city, Nairobi, had previously stumbled forward with a small number of acts, including Rock of Ages and the punk acts Class Suicide, Impish and Bloodshed, who were able to access rock and metal through motion picture soundtracks, expatriate connections and local black-market record shops. Though these acts, mainly formed at universities, were performing do-it-yourself (DIY) styled shows, the overreaching police and military were not far behind threatening scene participants and their families. Once Moi’s party (KANU) was voted out, economic and democratic liberalisation brought forward more fans, as acts were now able to perform openly without fear.

Since multi-party elections have taken hold, Kenya’s metal scene has been able to make a global imprint with acts such as Last Year’s Tragedy and Duma garnering international press³³ and even an annual metal festival, the Nairobi Metal Festival.³⁴ However, performers in the scene today are not without their difficulties. Subsequent elections have seen the country spiral into ethnically motivated violence following contested results, having personally affected the identity of local metal fans who have embraced this identity as one without the onus of the ethnic cleavages that remain a vestige of the country’s colonial legacy.

The Kenyan scene’s imprint and continued success is necessary for regional nations to step up, including neighbouring Uganda, whose rock scene came to light during the late 2000s and early 2010s, and includes the ‘African doom’ duo of Vale of Amonition and alternative-metal rockers Phyv5. Elsewhere, atmospheric black metal act Nishaiar and ‘Ethio rock’ act Jano have stepped forward as the only two acts performing electric guitar-driven music in Ethiopia. Though this represents only a handful of acts in the region outside of Kenya, it is clear that the presence of acts, albeit in modicum in the region, signals a shift in the right direction for electric guitar music to once again return to prominence.

Indian Ocean Islands and West Africa

Another country in Africa that attributes the formation of its rock and metal scene to a political transition is Madagascar. The island nation that is home to over 25 million – primarily descendants of Austronesians and Black Africans – has since the early 1990s embraced aspects of Western life, including the public enjoyment of rock and metal, which had already found a small audience in the country by way of migrant workers and expatriates.

This reach westward came via the government’s termination of a national policy of seclusion that was necessary for Madagascar to be able to ‘obtain credit from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’ after the country found itself bankrupt during its Second Republic.³⁵ These expansions allowed for rock and metal to reach an even larger audience and for the prospective musicians to access instruments and other Western goods previously unavailable to them. Early bands in the country include Apost, Green and Kazar. The sound of these acts was in line with their Western influences yet is distinguished by the use of the Malagasy language in place of English and French, the former being rock and metal’s primary language, and the latter being the nation’s colonial language.

Since its inception, the rock and metal scene in Madagascar has grown to be one of the largest in any African country in terms of the number of acts, based on my personal observations, with a very diverse metal scene that features a wide array of styles and sees the nation’s most popular acts enjoying wide levels of success nationally. This is the only scene in the entirety of Africa where hard rock acts are not only performing on national television but also in front of stadium-sized crowds. Further, what is remarkable about this particular scene is that musicians in Madagascar have carved out this scene in one of the poorest nations in the entire world. The World Bank estimates that 75 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, and only 13 per cent of the population has access to steady electricity.³⁶ Internet service remains feeble, the equipment necessary to perform metal is financially out of reach for many, as evidenced by the fact that musicians here routinely share equipment, and political strife has continued to plague the country in the early decades of the twenty-first century.³⁷ Unlike their counterparts on the African mainland, the Malagasy metal scene lacks an international presence; bands are not receiving international press like others in Africa, and acts from the country are seldom afforded the opportunity to embark on performances outside of their island, nor are they presented with the fortunes of being able to release music by way of international labels.

What has likely contributed to the lack of international attention toward the scene is the use of the Malagasy language, which is prominent among acts in the country. Madagascar’s metal scene is the only example of an African nation where metal bands perform primarily in their national language. Yet this metal scene’s embrace of their cultural roots has also separated metal bands here from their African contemporaries. Utilising a pre-Francophone style of speech known as the hainteny, an ornamented form of speech ladened with metaphors gifted from their ancestors³⁸ alongside traditional time signatures, acts here have distinguished themselves in ways that place their culture and history at the forefront of what they do.

Elsewhere in the Indian Ocean islands, near Madagascar, sit Reunion Island and Mauritius. Both islands have benefitted from a strong economic and modern infrastructure and have continually maintained a close relationship with the European continent, notably Reunion Island, whose status as a French overseas territory benefits its populations with the privileges of French citizenship. Both islands’ scenes exist with similar access to goods and Western musical resources and have been closely linked since their inception in the late 1950s.³⁹

The region of West Africa is among the continent’s quietest with regard to rock and metal. As alluded to earlier, the nations of Nigeria and Ghana at one time enjoyed vibrant rock scenes and are both slowly seeing a resurgence, with Ghana’s Dark Suburb and Nigeria’s The Isomers stepping forward. Regionally, nearby Niger and Mali are known for their ‘African rock’ scenes that are dominated by internationally known artists such as Mali-based Tinariwen, Nigerian bands Group Bombino and Group Inerane, and the Western Saharan band Group Doueh. While these particular acts owe more to the ‘rawness of garage rock’⁴⁰ than their predecessors of the 1950s and 1960s, they have also welcomed traditional infusions into their music.

The lone heavy metal band in the nation of Togo, Arka’n Asrafokor, also converges local musical proclivities of the members’ native Ewe sounds by including a traditionally-trained musician in their band, blending this aspect effortlessly alongside their Western influences into a hybrid sound best described by the band’s vocalist as ‘metal in our own language’.⁴¹ Though rarely performed, a few other bands throughout the continent have begun to incorporate local sounds into their brand of rock and metal, including the previously mentioned act Dividing The Element from Zimbabwe, who lean on Shona influences for their sound, and Botswana’s Wrust, who have incorporated a few aspects of Setswana clapping, call and response and 6/8 time signature with their brutally aggressive sound. What these infusions have allowed is for Africans to share their locales, their origin stories and their lived experiences through an already familiar style while paying homage to the sounds that are seeped into their consciousness. This approach serves to enhance the listenership of local fans who may otherwise be put off by the genre’s abrasiveness.

Conclusion

Although various African metal scenes have been recognised through a variety of press outlets and publications in recent years, metal in Africa has become a curiosity because it is the last place on the planet that metal fans, musicians and academics alike would have expected the genre to blossom. Yet, African metal’s existence should not be treated differently.

African metal stories speak of a genre that is empowering performers and fans alike. Metal has been able to elevate this platform because of the honesty this music provides, one that Western acts have also embraced by highlighting social and political issues in challenging the status quo through metal music. As Niall Scott states, ‘[h]eavy metal, both its music and culture, are in a position to resist the popular where the popular in music is an infantilized submission to sameness’.⁴² It is precisely for this reason that metal’s arrival in the continent has been embraced by a generation eager to perform a soundtrack that reflects their lives.

However, for African metal acts, an overwhelming challenge remains: validation from their Western peers. How could their efforts be compromised by way of their geographic origins? And how would ‘othering’ affect the manner in which their work and contributions could be valued with the same dignity and respect that Western contributions are held? Only time will tell. It is not up to Africans to change their image, their sound or their location in order to succeed. It is up to the Global North to open their ears to an already familiar sound from an otherwise unfamiliar continent for the sake of truly embracing the ultimate panacea of a collective global metal scene that many fans have long proclaimed exists, yet with little inclination to invite members of the Global South to the table. Heavy metal’s presence in Africa serves to embolden fans and empower performers in a manner that could ultimately provide the necessary validation from Westerners and send a signal that Africa is now this genre’s ultimate frontier.

Maybe we should begin our contribution to this book with a disclaimer. A statement on what this brief chapter aims to be, and more importantly, what it is not. It is not our intent to portray an all-encompassing picture of Latin American metal for the reader. That endeavour is too extensive to be contemplated here and merits a more extensive and comprehensive reflection that does justice to the music created in the region. For most readers, Latin America will seem, from the outside, like a monolithic region. Far from this conceptualisation, the countries, peoples and communities that make up Latin America are greatly varied and diverse, as manifested in their languages, traditions, histories and geographies. Latin America is an incarnation of plurality, albeit sometimes a systematically silenced one. We will not foster this silence with the plethora of metal scenes in the region, which are diverse and marked by varied socio-political experiences. Consequently, this chapter does not aspire to offer a summary of metal in Latin America, and we invite readers to look to the emerging research on the region for such a purpose. Instead, what we aim to do in this chapter is examine one of the endeavours Latin American music has predominantly engaged in, namely decoloniality, and use this as a bedrock to examine what we consider to be a pertinent question: What has Latin American metal ever done for the international metal scene? We believe that the answer to this question lies at the juncture of and brings forth a call for ethics in metal music, as we aim to succinctly explain throughout this chapter.

As most metal music researchers will attest, sometimes the answer to our research questions manifests unexpectedly. In a casual conversation with a fan or a musician, one comment can open up an unanticipated area of reflection. We would like to use one example to highlight this argument. While interviewing Pablo Trangone, singer for the Argentinian metal band Arraigo, our conversation on metal music veered drastically towards the topic of Latin America proper. Pablo was less interested in talking about the sounds of metal music in his country and more concerned with what metal music was doing, or should be doing, to address the plights of local people in the wider Latin American region. He posed poignant questions: ‘what is metal if not that scream that makes visible all the people that will be struck down in Latin America during the coming years? What is metal, if it’s not that? If it’s not that … then it’s nothing’. Pablo’s reflection during our conversation made two things clearly palpable. First, that he saw the plight faced by local communities from a regional perspective. He was not concerned solely with Argentinian agony but rather with Latin American suffering. This suffering was currently manifested as exploitative neoliberalism, but this just happened to be the most recent expression of a deeper experience defined by a history of colonialism. Second, that Pablo interpreted metal music as an artistic endeavour with an underlying responsibility towards its context; in this case, that meant an oppressive context. In his opinion, music demanded an agenda marked by visibility. If it did not assume this agenda, then it would be relegated to futility. This sentiment has been echoed by metal musicians in every Latin American country we have engaged with in our ethnographic work. Pablo was not alone in his call for a socially committed metal music that understood the historical plights of individuals and communities under colonialism and its ongoing effects throughout Latin America. He was, even if inadvertently, pointing to the decolonial role of metal music in Latin America.

Decolonial Metal Music

In light of many encounters like the one with Pablo, we have argued that metal music in Latin America has engaged in critical reflections pertaining to the colonial history of the region.¹ It explicitly recognises that the colonial process is not over, and that its consequences remain an ongoing concern, representing a process that Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano has termed coloniality.² We have posited that metal confronts coloniality through extreme decolonial dialogues.³ We define these as ‘invitations, ones particularly interested in promoting transformation, made through metal music to engage in critical reflections about oppressive practices faced by Latin American communities in light of coloniality’. We label these experiences dialogues in order to highlight the interaction between those who are informed about coloniality and those who have yet to, or sometimes refuse to, comprehend it. These dialogues are an exchange of information between equals, as proposed by Paulo Freire,⁴ posited in opposition to a didactic top-down approach where only one part of the dyad possesses correct information. They are decidedly decolonial precisely because ‘metal bands engage in dialogues that are concerned with the historical process of oppression faced by the region, stemming from 15th-century colonialism and its lingering effects into the present day’. Finally, these dialogues are extreme primarily because they are perceived as threatening to ‘those unfamiliar to metal aesthetics and sounds’ and because they address issues related to ‘death, violence, and oppression’, which tend to ‘worry unfamiliar listeners in the region; this includes politicians and the media’. They address issues of extremity (for example, violence, murder, political repression) that some people in the region would rather soon forget. These decolonial reflections in metal music have also found their relevance in metal studies throughout the Global South.⁵

As we continue to unpack the utility of extreme decolonial dialogues to better understand what metal does throughout Latin America, we wish to take this opportunity to reflect on the ethical dimensions of these dialogues. To delve into these dimensions, we will focus here on a certain quality or aura of defiance and confrontation, which we have found manifested in the ethics performed by many practitioners embedded in the region; as such, we have come to call these a metal ethics of affront.

A Metal Ethics of Affront

The debate over the ethical and unethical use of music, its sounds, lyrical messages and accompanying imagery has always cast a long shadow over metal music. We would be repetitive in discussing the censorship of the music espoused by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the United States during the 1980s. Still, it is important to note that these perceptions are very much still present in some places of the world as we write this chapter. The legal battle between Behemoth’s singer, Nergal, and the Polish government over accusations of blasphemy would be just one example of current concerns over the unethical dimensions of metal music.⁶ Still, as scholars, we are aware that the call for an examination of the unethical uses of music has not always been based on moral panics, but rather on very fair concerns over the ways music can be utilised to oppress people and trample on their well-being. The work of Steve Goodman highlights, for example, the use of music during warfare.⁷ The same could be said of Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan’s reflection on the use of music as part of State violence.⁸ These contributions serve today as important invitations to continuously reflect on the ethical dimensions of music. But how useful are ethical conceptualisations of music in our understanding of metal in Latin America and its decolonial endeavour? This question has received little attention in metal scholarship, and we understand the field is prime to finally engage it.

An examination of two important publications on music and ethics is useful to understand how an ethical approach stemming from metal music in Latin America would benefit from a new set of conceptual tools. The first is Kathleen Marie Higgin’s book on music and ethics, entitled The Music of Our Lives.⁹ In it, she offers an important and comprehensive analysis of the ways music can impact our lives in an ethical manner. Still, throughout her work, there is an almost homeostatic view of ethics and music. By this, we mean that music is seen as an alleviator of conflict. For example, she proposes that listening to music ‘gives us a very immediate sense of enjoyably sharing our world with others’.¹⁰ This idea is driven home by an idealised view of the world when she posits that music ‘involves a sense of sharing life with others’.¹¹ These positions reflect not only a particular view of the relation between music and ethics but of the world itself, one where the world and life itself are enjoyably shared with others. This conceptualisation might stem from her overall view of ethics as a way of ‘living at ease with one’s environment’ and how music ‘develops our ability to approach others in a nondefensive, noncompetitive manner’.¹² Although these views on ethics, music and the sharing of life with others might seem useful for some readers, we posit that they are particularly idealistic. They seem to present a homeostatic view of the world where balanced and just interactions amongst people are achieved. They leave little room to understand how music, used in an ethical manner, has little to do with homeostasis, and is more closely linked to challenging historical patterns of oppression through confrontation. In a homeostatic social scenario, the need for social change seems like a chimaera.

Subsequent reflections on music and ethics have pushed back, to an extent, on these homeostatic views. For example, in their book entitled Music and Ethics, Marcel Cobussen and Nannette Nielsen explore music as an artform to encounter the other; those who are different from oneself and therefore experience the world in a dissimilar manner.¹³ Although they cement their reflection on multiple views on ethics, it seems particularly significant to us that they reference Zygmunt Bauman’s conceptualisation of ethics as ‘being for the other’ in light of the oppressions presented by the European modern project on particular populations.¹⁴ Although this is an important step away from the more homeostatic view on music and ethics outlined earlier, we still feel it is too ambiguous to understand the ethical dimensions of metal music in Latin America. The other is presented as an indistinct figure, devoid of a specific context, political geography, particular history and precise oppressive experiences. For example, in their reflection on the ethical role of music, the colonial experience is not mentioned outright. It remains a moot point.

We would like to posit that metal music in Latin America, particularly that which has a decolonial tone, dominant or inflexion, provides its listeners with a radically different ethical experience; one that is less concerned with fostering homeostatic relations and prefers to explore the tensions generated by social oppression. In essence, metal in Latin America posits an ethics that is strengthened by its specificity regarding the oppressive experiences people live through and the tensions generated in the encounters between the oppressors and the oppressed. The reflections generated by this ethical approach have little to do with enjoyably sharing life with those who oppress us or living at ease with the effects of coloniality. Instead, what we see is an ethics of affront. An ethics that recognises everyday life as a constant struggle for liberation from oppression and uses the arts, in this case metal music, to practically and symbolically confront this positionality via sounds, images and practices that disrupt the illusions of social homeostasis by generating emotional discomfort. We wish to identify three of its guiding principles while simultaneously recognising that there could be, and should be, many more.

Principle 1: Acknowledging the humanity of those oppressed by coloniality: One of the main drivers of coloniality has been the devaluation of indigenous people, their experiences and knowledge-producing practices through systematic racism, violence and epistemicide. Indigenous people in the Americas have suffered a great burden in this process, which has aimed to deprive them of the very basic notion of humanity. The colonial experience of the fifteenth century, with its practices and laws, deprived the members of these communities of their right to be considered human, or of even being seen as having a soul. Nelson Maldonado-Torres has worked extensively on this form of colonial oppression and has labelled this mechanism as ‘the coloniality of being’.¹⁵ Metal music in Latin America has challenged this type of colonisation by placing the indigenous peoples of the region, and more importantly, their plights, at the forefront of their musical endeavour.¹⁶

Some important examples include Peruvian band Kranium’s song ‘El Obraje’ (1999), which describes the exploitation of indigenous people through forced servitude. More importantly, metal songs have been able to advocate for the humanity of indigenous people by describing them as powerful, knowledgeable and, equally important, visible. Other examples include Puya’s (Puerto Rico) depiction of taíno ceremonial practices in the song ‘Areyto’ on Areyto (2019) Werken’s (Argentina) conceptualisation of Indian blood as a source of power (Sangre India) on Plegaria Al Sur (2010), Yanacona’s (Argentina) celebration of indigenous warriors and leaders (Tupac Amaru) on Por La Sangre Derramada (1999), and Ch’aska’s (Peru) telling of indigenous war victories. Equally important is metal music’s celebration of indigenous worldviews and ideas, as exemplified by the band Egregor (Chile) in their album Pachakuti (2020); it represents a term used to depict Inca legends and conceptualisations of time. These are but some examples of the way decolonial metal music recognises the humanity in others impacted by coloniality.

This ethical positioning through metal music could be best understood by relying on the conceptualisation of ethics that stems from the region itself and recognising the ongoing implications of its colonial experience. The work by Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel on ethics and the philosophy of liberation seems to us like the perfect example.¹⁷ After specifically examining the oppressive practices embedded in the colonial process in the Americas, Dussel calls for a philosophy of liberation that fosters an ‘ethical conscience’ as a strategy to challenge coloniality. This is the ‘capacity one has to listen to the other’s voice’ in order to understand the injustices they face. Notice how this call is not universalist in nature but rather specific to the region’s experiences. Decolonial metal music in Latin America echoes this call via its extreme decolonial dialogues by listening to the voices of those most affected by coloniality, placing them front and centre, and amplifying not just their experiences of oppression but, perhaps more importantly, their stories of emancipation.

Principle 2: Acknowledging the reality of the socio-political context: When Latin America is viewed by people from a Global North perspective – that is, from the geographies and worldviews that initiated fifteenth-century colonialism and foster coloniality today – some of the events that have taken place in our socio-political contexts might seem too extraordinary to be true. Dictatorships, the systematic disappearance of political activists, the extermination of indigenous populations, and government-sponsored murder of local communities are just some of the oppressive practices that have plagued the region. Some of them are so extraordinary, so distant from the comforts of the Global North, that they might seem like exaggerations, as mere artefacts of our imagination. But they are very real and, most concerning, many are ongoing.

Decolonial metal music in Latin America has aimed to make those events, and the socio-political contexts that foster them, visible to the rest of the world. An examination of the lyrical content of some metal bands will evidence discussions on colonisation and its social implications: Aggressive’s (Colombia) ‘Predator’s Mind’; A.N.I.M.A.L.’s (Argentina) ‘Gritemos Para No Olvidar’; Dremis Derinfet’s (Colombia) ‘Cruz, Corona y Guerra’; Huinca’s (Chile) ‘América Letrina’; Hermética’s (Argentina) ‘La Revancha de América’; Ratos de Porão’s (Brazil) ‘Amazônia Nunca Mais’. Other bands have focused on very specific local events, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century regional wars and conflicts: Custom71’s (Argentina) ‘Alas de Gloria’; Tren Loco’s (Argentina) ‘Acorazado Belgrano’; Abäk’s (Costa Rica) ‘Santa Rosa’; Gillman’s (Venezuela) ‘La Batalla de Carabobo’. Perhaps the crudest and most lyrically compelling songs are those that address local massacres: Azeroth’s (Argentina) ‘Campaña del Desierto’; Demolición’s (Ecuador) ‘Noviembre Negro’. Taken together, these are all efforts from metal bands to validate their local histories, even when they might seem all too incredible to be believed by outsiders.¹⁸

We understand that decolonial metal music echoes practices found in regional literature that aim to validate these histories as real. For example, Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier developed the notion of lo real maravilloso (the awe-inspiring real) as a way to describe the West’s inability to comprehend the elusive quality of life as lived in Latin America.¹⁹ He aimed to reflect the idea that, to the outside world, certain events associated with the region might seem unbelievable. We believe his term, when juxtaposed with what metal music in the region does, helps us understand the relationship between Latin America and the rest of the world. It serves to stress that, for Latin Americans, the above-mentioned events are part of our history and reality. We are witnesses to them today. Therefore, we understand that metal music engages in an ethics of affront when echoing lo real maravilloso to account for its context against those who would deny them. What is being described in these songs is all too real, regardless of how unbelievable it may seem to others.

We would be remiss if we limited this ethical acknowledgement of the Latin American context to an examination of song lyrics. It is also intimately related to the local sounds integrated into the metal music created in the region. Thus, the incorporation of instruments like the quena, zampoñas, batá and the charango are frequently described by musicians as ways of transmitting socio-political messages to listeners in the Global North. For example, the batá as a rhythmic instrument has been used in Cuban metal as a way to clearly link the genre to Afro-Caribbean roots.²⁰ The quenas and zampoñas are local wind instruments integrated into metal to transmit emotions, specifically melancholy, over the oppressions experienced in the Andean region.²¹ These sounds, alien to metal music in the Global North, serve this ethical principle by telling its listeners something about the socio-political context in which they were generated. This is vitally important since, as Cobussen and Nielsen have argued, the ethical dimension of music goes beyond the words being sung, and includes the ‘sounds penetrating the body, cutting across the duality of physical and emotional processes’.²²

Principle 3: Fostering activist action as a task for metal music: A third principle that we wish to stress in describing the ethics of affront posed by decolonial metal music in Latin America is activist action. That is, the use of metal music and culture to call for engagement in social activism against the varied manifestations of coloniality in the region. This call echoes invitations from scholars and artists to engage in varied forms of ‘artivism’, or the use of the arts as social protest, which has been called for in the Latin American context.²³ This has happened through various local bands’ lyrical content, support for other activist communities and via direct participation in protests.

The lyrical content of metal music in Latin America has demonstrated support for social justice movements throughout its history. Two significant examples can be seen in Mexican and Venezuelan metal music. In Mexico, the band Leprosy dedicated their 1998 album Llora Chiapas to the Zapatista movement in open support of the indigenous people of the region. The Venezuelan band Gillman addressed the 1989 protest, known as El Caracazo, against the neoliberal practices of the Carlos Andrés Pérez government on El Regreso Del Guerrero (1990). These are examples of the most prominent ways in which metal music engages in social protest through critical reflections about the manifestations of coloniality in their settings.

Other bands have gone from singing about activist groups or events to accompanying local communities in their plights. Such is the case of the Ecuadorian band Curare, who have worked alongside communities affected by mining in the Imbabura region. They are known for being in constant collaboration with these communities and supporting them by playing music in their educational events as a way to foster the building of knowledge related to environmental exploitation. This role of support to the ongoing battles faced by communities echoes the call made by Boaventura de Sousa Santos to use the arts as a way to make visible the plights of groups impacted by coloniality and how they generate knowledge through these experiences.²⁴ In this manner, bands like Curare become part of what he has termed a sociology of emergences that aims to make visible the abyssal line dividing the world between the oppressors and the oppressed, stress the value of the knowledge produced by those affected, and highlight how they resist. Bands like Curare make that line visible, albeit sonically.

Finally, it must be stressed that Latin American metal music’s call for engagement in social activism has not been limited to lyrical content or signs of support; it has called for the taking of the streets. As we write this chapter, Colombia has erupted in protests against tributary reforms that echo the most sinister agenda of neoliberalism. The government has deployed the police and armed forces to face the protestors, and as so many times in the region, violence and death have been the outcome. There have been a plethora of Colombian metal bands posting messages of support on social media and, more significantly for our reflection on ethics, taken to the streets. One important example is the band Corpus Calvary from Bogotá, who have joined protesters in marches and public demonstrations. They posted a video on their Facebook wall sending out a message in support of the national strike. It showed masked members of the band on the streets while tires burned behind them and black smoke filled the street. ‘Long live the resistance’, one of the members stated in the short video.

Discussion and Conclusion

Metal fans in the Global North, particularly those who saw themselves as part of the international metal scene during the 1980s, will probably recognise, even if unconsciously, some of our conceptual positionings in this short chapter. They will surely remember that moment when they held in their hands their first Sepultura tape. There was a sense of foreignness to it. This was a band from Brazil, a place where they probably had never set foot in; therefore, it did not occur to them to think of the ways in which life played out for the youth there. They read the magazine articles describing how the band’s young musicians came from poverty, used the favelas as backdrop images for their music, and had recently survived a military dictatorship.²⁵ One thing was clear: these people were different from metal musicians in the Global North. The band’s linkages with indigenous populations later in their career would drive this point home even more. Latin America was something else, and metal music there reflected it. Of course, many would limit their gaze to this singular Brazilian band and neglect to understand that this difference was embodied and musicalized by many others in the region. Now, several decades later, we can see how these explicit differences, embodied by bands like Sepultura and many others, were initial indicators of the emerging ethics of affront we have described here.

Let us revisit the question that serves as the title for our chapter. What has Latin American metal music ever done for us? We posit that it has fostered in metal music a reflection on oppression that distances itself from the more general critiques of modernity we see in a lot of metal in the Global North. It is a specific reflection that reminds listeners that for people in the Global South, modernity cannot be understood outside coloniality.²⁶ Therefore, metal music’s examination of the social conditions lived through in the region constantly references the colonial past and its present-day consequences. In presenting these patterns of oppression, and critiquing them vehemently, metal music in Latin America called for an ethical positioning of the music genre and its practitioners. The observations posed by metal in the Global North, general in nature and seemingly devoid of any reference to our conditions, were not enough for us. The European universalist perspective, manifested in their knowledge-building practices, and therefore also in the music emanating from the North, did not account for our experience. We needed to tell our colonial history through sounds, images and words. We needed to use them, simultaneously, to challenge that colonial history. We needed them, and still do today, to believe there is a way to move beyond the colonial experience and the modern project, what Dussel has called transmodernity.²⁷ Latin American metal infused the international scene with a call to ethics, a specific ethics of affront that sees little room for social homeostasis in a world still dominated by coloniality.

The ethics of affront posed by metal music in Latin America also has implications for metal-related scholarship. They are a call to examine metal as more than a musical genre, more than a sequence of musical notes to be dissected, and more than a passing fad of youth. Rather, metal music should be studied as a way of understanding how people in Latin America, and the Global South in general, use extreme forms of music to learn about their context and gather a deeper understanding of the social and political forces that sustain oppressive practices. This will be key to the expansion of, and critical engagement with, some of the ideas posed by metal scholars in the Global North. For example, the sometimes tense relation between metal and politics that has been stressed by some scholars clearly comes to mind.²⁸ Something different has happened in Latin American metal, and there seems to be little room, or at least a rapidly diminishing space, for those who support metal music’s ‘reflexive anti-reflexivity’, described by Keith Kahn-Harris.²⁹ The ethics of affront seems to be gaining ground. Its three principles (acknowledging the humanity of those oppressed by coloniality, recognising the reality of the region’s socio-political context, and fostering activist action as a realm for metal music) now permeate the work of a growing number of metal bands in Latin America.

‘What is metal if not that scream that makes visible all the people that will be struck down in Latin America during the coming years? What is metal, if it’s not that? If it’s not that … then it’s nothing’, stated Pablo while sitting in his living room in Argentina. His question served as a call to the ethics of affront. As if his interrogation had been heard by others in the region, the answers seemed to spawn everywhere at once: Chilean metal musicians running for political office and working to change the Pinochet era constitution; Colombian metal singers being recognised by their local governments for fostering historical memory against violence; Cuban metal bands battling for State support of the arts; Venezuelan musicians denouncing the US imperialist blockade of their country; Ecuadorian metal musicians engaging in environmentalist activism. They are all participants of an ethics of affront in Latin American metal. They stand as examples of what metal in the Global North could do now. What has Latin American metal music done for us? A lot. It has shown the way. More work needs to be done. But if we are to hear the echoes of that scream, this is a pattern setting up further opportunities for sonic, physical and sociocultural and political forms of affront. Metal was always rebellious and in your face, and that remains the case. It is just that the stakes of that rebelliousness in certain sociocultural theatres are undeniably higher. In a theatre like Latin America, we are witnessing a masterclass of the type of work and transformation that is possible.

Despite the country’s remoteness, Australian metal music has remained largely in line with developments in metal music globally. Practically every major chapter in metal bears a timely parallel Down Under, and the Australian adoption of these global movements, from metal’s late sixties advent to the commercial success of contemporary metalcore, is rarely relayed without some distinctive variation. Exactly what common qualities one could ascribe to these myriad and diverse musics is at the heart of a growing scholarly literature on Australian metal, often contained within the broader question of the music’s Australian identity. This literature comes at this question from various angles. Most scholars, oftentimes echoing the larger precursory literature on Australian popular music more broadly, examine the cultural tropes which underpin the music’s development and character. They identify irreverent humour,¹ working-class masculine identities and a predominance of white performers as common traits.² Some look at how these characterisations are implied or explicated in paramusical³ texts, from incendiary political or ideological materials,⁴ to provocative record titles and deliberately offensive lyrics, and the juxtaposition of the brutal and the mundane.⁵ Some scholars, albeit a limited subset, consider the musical texts themselves, expounding on themes of stylistic hybridisation and pushing at the limits of convention, both in style and intensity.⁶ Although offering a multifaceted sense of this music, this literature is young, and there is abundant space and scope with which to develop understandings of Australian metal moving forward.

Australia, as a country, is notable for being dominantly Western in its culture but geographically isolated from its Western counterparts. Further, it is a country where major population centres are spread farther apart than many European countries, and where scenic hubs are likewise scattered and isolated. It has historically been unavoidable for Australian metal artists to negotiate with distance on both international and national scales. A manifestation of this relationship is artists who, because of their isolation, are removed from the pronounced scenic pressures in metal music hubs worldwide, and whose music is accordingly singular and challenging of norms.

This chapter explores how this circumstance, alongside aspects of Australia’s culture, has instigated unique artistic statements in many of its most prominent metal artists. There are instances of such artists spanning the history of Australian metal in myriad substyles and scenes, and while not wholly unique to Australia, this quality’s presence across time and style establishes it as a useful concept through which to frame Australian metal. This chapter will cursorily explore the history of Australian metal, focusing on three diverse bands who demonstrate varying negotiations with this quality in different periods. These bands are Buffalo, a rough and provocative Sydney-based proto-heavy metal band from the early seventies; Sadistik Exekution, an extraordinarily heavy and influential Sydney-based death metal band formed in the mid-eighties; and Ne Obliviscaris, a sophisticated and innovative Melbourne-based progressive extreme metal band with a career spanning the 2000s to the present.

The Emergence of Australian Heavy Metal

Australia is a vast and sparsely populated island distanced from its Western cultural counterparts, and indeed most places, by days on a plane. Its population, around 25 million at the time of writing, are spread out across a landmass a little under 80 per cent of the size of the continental United States. Its sparse population and geographical diffusion have had a profound impact on the development of its music industry, often portrayed as hinderingly careful and conservative.⁷ While each of Australia’s eight states and territories has a capital city, two amongst them – Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria) – currently bear approximately 50 per cent of the Australian music industry,⁸ although the former has had significantly less governmental support than the latter in recent years.⁹ These two have historically been represented as rivals.¹⁰ In a musical example, Rosemary Overell describes Melbourne’s grindcore scene as being constructed in part by their distance from Sydney’s counterpart scene, the latter being portrayed tendentiously by Melbourne scene members as weak, inauthentic and feminine.¹¹ Next to Sydney and Melbourne in population size are Brisbane (Queensland) and Perth (Western Australia), the latter being particularly isolated with almost 2,700 km (by car) of desert distancing it from its nearest major city-neighbour, Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. Smaller still are Canberra, Australia’s capital city situated in the small Australian Capital Territory, Darwin in the sparsely populated Northern Territory, and Hobart in the small southern island of Tasmania. All these cities and their respective states have produced metal bands and scenes of varying influence and success.

Australian music artists negotiate with a host of challenges due to their location: it is expensive for them to tour internationally or nationally beyond the largest cities, the country has had a historical dearth of quality recording studios,¹² and it has been traditionally challenging to disseminate Australian music worldwide, especially outside of the ambit of major labels. Moreover, compared to its UK and European cultural counterparts, Australia has had relatively little national or state governmental support for developing its musical exports, especially compared to other forms of media like cinema, where there has been a more tangible project of developing a ‘national film culture’.¹³ Australia’s policy support for its music industry has remained, since the late sixties, cautious, exclusive and occasionally corrupt.¹⁴ It has taken the rise of a handful of globally successful musical exports over the span of decades – the Bee Gees, INXS, etc. – for Australian popular music to be treated as a ‘site for national cultural assertion’.¹⁵

Considering the span of this industry and its capitalist stakes, it is little surprise that promoting an Australian identity – whatever that might mean – has been a low priority for record companies. Resultantly, many of Australia’s biggest musical exports, especially prior to the advent of the internet, have been arguably stylistically alike to their counterparts in the United States and UK.¹⁶ Of course, this industry prudence and emphasis on reinforcing a global, saleable standard over stimulating more original directions in this music filters down in even more concentrated manners to less commercially viable musics like metal. Nevertheless, while relatively few Australian metal acts have reached the upper tiers of commercial success, the country has always had a persistent and reasonably influential metal music underground.

Paul Oldham dates the earliest characteristics of a proto-heavy metal musical style in Australia to around 1965.¹⁷ In this period, Australia’s remoteness precluded it from the touring schedules of American and European artists, and so a handful of acts rose to occupy this space. The earliest Australian proto-heavy metal acts, for the most part constituting Australia’s celebrated Oz Rock or pub rock lineage, were Lobby Loyde, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, and Buffalo. Loyde, who first led Melbourne-based hard rock bands the Purple Hearts and the Wild Cherries in the mid to late sixties before forming the highly influential Coloured Balls in the early seventies, is lauded as Australia’s first rock guitar hero.¹⁸ Coloured Balls’ music is muscular, tongue-in-cheek and experimental. Although founded in blues, it shows prototypical strains of punk and progressive rock and acts as something of a bellwether for the forming pub rock movement’s heavier contingent. Heavily influenced by Loyde, with whom he collaborated and from whom he received guitar lessons, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs would perform blues-derived hard rock music remembered for its ear-splitting volume due to Thorpe’s amassing and combining of PA equipment. Thorpe, nicknamed ‘King Yobbo’ at the time – a term inferring a boisterous and brash character – would become the infamous star of pub rock, often arrested for profanity and raucous behaviour on stage.

The latter, Sydney’s Buffalo (formed in 1971 in Sydney out of the ashes of Brisbane-formed band Head), have the strongest claim at being Australia’s first heavy metal band,¹⁹ personifying a style reasonably alike Black Sabbath, who had formed three years prior. Buffalo released their debut album, Dead Forever (1972), through Vertigo, an imprint of Philips/Phonogram, the home of proto-heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath and Status Quo; prog rock bands like Gentle Giant and Van Der Graaf Generator; and later, Metallica. Buffalo were the first non-European or British band to be signed to this label, arguably a failed attempt by A&R Dermot Hoy to establish an Australian identity in the label’s Sydney base. It saw little promotion in Britain, although it was distributed to several Western European countries, and the band remained mostly unknown on the isles.²⁰ Despite these circumstances, the band’s debut managed to sell 25,000 copies²¹ and achieve a limited following in Europe. Interestingly, this route, including signing to a European record label, would be repeated similarly in the eighties by thrash/death metal bands like Hobbs’ Angel of Death and Mortal Sin. This period is discussed in the next section.

Buffalo’s music is reminiscent of British blues-derived proto-heavy metal, although bearing some notable musical properties. Guitarist John Baxter, called ‘the heart and soul of [Buffalo]’, purportedly had no instinct for, nor interest in, the blues, which founded the band’s earliest stylistic practice.²² This imprinted on the largely harmonically static and rhythmically pummelling character of Buffalo’s mid-seventies work. Their music, even within its more psychedelic and exploratory elements, retains a harder, more overtly masculine edge than much European or North American psychedelic music in the period, practically bereft of the folk leanings, spacey extemporisations, or studio effects manipulations respectively common to many of the most prominent bands in this style.

The more notable element of Buffalo’s work, though, is the character of their paramusical material: album covers, lyrics and song titles. The band were ignored by radio and so needed to capture attention in different manners. Their answer was provocative imagery, like the album art of Volcanic Rock (1973), where a fully nude androgynous figure holds a statue of what appears to be a penis over their head while standing on an erupting volcano, itself reminiscent of a menstruating female figure; or the cover to its 1974 follow-up, Only Want You for Your Body, which shows a woman strapped to a torture rack with her dress hiked up to her neck. Buffalo’s lyrics are celebratory of conservative concepts of hetero-normative masculinity and misogyny: sexual conquest, machismo, ideation of domination and power, and light homophobia. Most of these qualities are represented to varying degrees in concurrent global hard rock and heavy metal music, but Buffalo’s demonstration of these themes and their provocativeness seems especially deliberate. Indeed, the act of being confrontational and incendiary was a proclaimed goal of the band; its effect justified as necessary to garner attention in an otherwise conservative cultural milieu. But it was avowedly light-hearted. This quality, using the jocular intention of something to soften or justify its provocativeness, proves reasonably common in discussions of Australian metal music and will be problematised further in the next section.

Buffalo’s negotiation with distance is multifaceted. In their hometown of Sydney, they were effectively a local band, relegated, due to both relatively low demand and draconian liquor licensing laws, to gigs in schools and municipal halls.²³ The sites of performance would move to pubs through the early seventies alongside a broad liberal cultural shift, but the band’s (ample) national touring remained limited to the scope of this underground scene, despite their record deal and overseas sales.²⁴ Buffalo’s isolation is an important factor in their global uptake, but the more interesting scope, at least in terms of the band’s sound and character, is their engagement with local music institutions. Their assiduously provocative paramusical materials were ostensibly a direct result of being ignored or cast aside by Australia’s own music media and radio. Their contrarian-charged attitude of avoiding the trappings of pop stardom, too, seems custom-made for the idiosyncratic space they occupied in the Australian music industry. Perhaps this embodies an engagement with the mounting modernist discourse in rock music in the late sixties and early seventies: the pervasive sense of being individualistic, artistic and uncorrupted by capitalist machinations.²⁵ In Buffalo’s case, though, the theme bears a more comedically rebellious tone invocative of the Australian larrikin, an archetype explored in the next section.

The late seventies saw Australia’s answer to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal steadily emerge, reaching a high in terms of both the number of acts and their respective prominence in the early to mid-eighties. This was something of a watershed period in Australian metal’s development, offering a host of stylistically diverse bands in varied metal substyles spanning the country’s capital cities, from the progressive metal of Melbourne’s Taramis to Canberra-founded proto-death metal act Armoured Angel, to Melbourne speed metal pioneers Nothing Sacred, and dozens of others. The profusion of new bands and growing underground interest was supported by several important individuals and institutions, which provided limited platforms for their distribution. These included radio shows and deejays like Allan Thomas from 3RRR in Melbourne; record stores like Sydney’s Utopia Records and Melbourne’s Central Station Records, which acted as scenic hubs as well as distributors; and eventually concerts like the famed yearly event, Metal for Melbourne, which started in 1981 and which – for five non-consecutive instalments ending in 1986 – acted as the premier Australian heavy music festival.²⁶ These identities and circumstances laid the groundwork for several more idiosyncratic and unique stylistic trajectories to develop throughout the eighties with an increasing presence in, and influence on, the global metal scene. The following section will explore the case of Australian extreme metal in the mid to late eighties and specifically the challenges faced, and the imprint left, by Sydney’s Sadistik Exekution.

Australian Extreme Metal

The advent of extreme metal in the early to mid-eighties embodied a significant shift in the character of metal music up to that point. Key extreme metal scenes and bands included British grindcore led by Napalm Death (formed 1981); the Bay Area death metal scene led by Possessed (formed 1983), Floridan death metal (the Tampa Scene) including Morbid Angel and Death in the mid-eighties; contemporaneous Swedish death metal including Morbid and Entombed; and the formative embodiment of Norwegian black metal, Mayhem (formed 1984). All these substyles were underground musics entrenched in paramusically transgressive and widely sonically unpalatable genre markers. Both Australia’s first extreme metal act, Slaughter Lord, and their most successful extreme metal export at this time, Mortal Sin, formed throughout 1985, essentially concurrent to these global developments in extreme metal music.

Early Australian extreme metal artists and fans were able to remain abreast of developments thousands of kilometres away due primarily to two technologies: tape trading and zines. The former describes private mail distribution of demo tapes and bootlegs, often between ‘pen pals’ and sometimes through small-scale mail-order operations. The latter describes self-published, printed and distributed magazines. While facilitating the spanning of global distance, these avenues also influenced the emerging music, encompassing simultaneously curation and consumption. It was due to these technologies that many of Australia’s earliest extreme metal exponents were known outside of the country before they had any significant name nationally. Melbourne’s Hobbs’ Angel of Death, an early Australian death metal band, exemplify this situation. The band’s grisly output, styled as ‘virgin metal’ to allude to its purity and uncompromising nature, earned the band a record deal with German label Steamhammer and relatively strong sales abroad while remaining relatively unknown at home.

Sydney’s Sadistik Exekution (formed in late 1985) provide an especially compelling example of how isolation and obstinate ideals facilitated a singular and influential musical statement. The band formed alongside the burgeoning Norwegian black metal scene and were known to key players like Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth of Mayhem and Jon ‘Metalion’ Kristiansen, the editor of perhaps the most pivotal zine on the development of black metal in Northern Europe, Slayer. Kristiansen, a member of the infamous ‘inner circle’ of Norwegian black metal, claims that Sadistik Exekution was ‘the most important band in Slayer mag history’.²⁷

Sadistik Exekution’s output is as fierce and intense as that of any of their contemporaries in the late eighties and early nineties. Their music blends a hellish Norwegian black metal-styled tremolo-heavy guitar approach with a primal and ceaseless drum battery, largely constituted of blast beats. Their music, which they considered death metal, is sometimes taken to be prototypical of the ‘war metal’ substyle, merging black and death metal.²⁸ In addition to this hybrid foundation, the band have two notable elements which differentiate them from most contemporaneous extreme metal. First, their bassist, Dave Slave, often featured in a prominent melodic role in the band, is far more virtuosic and foregrounded than is normal of the time and style (an interesting parallel to draw with the next case study, Ne Obliviscaris). Secondly, their singer, Rok, covers a wide range of atypical vocal and lyrical approaches. Rok’s vocals veer from black metal shrieks and guttural barks to comedic yells, theatrical moans, and barrages of decisively Australian profanity and insults delivered in a thick Australian drawl. This vocabulary includes slang and expressions such as ‘drongos’, ‘how ya’s going?’, ‘bloody crook’, and myriad other instances of Australian vernacular and idiom. Viewed within the context of early extreme metal, such affectations are unusually self-aware, highlighting an intrinsic absurdity. This activity relates to Kahn-Harris’ ‘reflexive anti-reflexivity’: a concept in metal studies used to explain how metal practitioners and fans can simultaneously champion the thematic integrity of something while actually comprehending it as the opposite.²⁹ The difference in Sadistik Exekution’s work, as compared to most of their contemporaries, is the temerity with which they rejected metal coding, specifically its pursuit of thematic pretence and po-faced seriousness. Further, they considered this very seriousness and pretence as weak and inauthentic; to quote Rok: ‘we were Australian, not Norwegian, we were rough and aggressive, not thin and feminine sounding’.³⁰ In this late eighties and early nineties extreme metal milieu, no bands were as brazen as they were in highlighting and revelling in absurdity and madness (and its inherent comedy). This awareness of the ludicrousness of one’s approach alongside an effectively intense and thematically transgressive artistic output would later become a mainstay of much Australian extreme metal, from Ballarat’s Damaged to Melbourne’s Blood Duster and Frankenbox, and, more recently, to King Parrot, also from Melbourne.

Sadistik Exekution’s isolation explains much of this character. The band developed in a space largely bereft of stylistic contemporaries, thereby sidestepping the strict inter-scenic proliferation of codes like those seen in, for example, Norwegian black metal. Their tether to global scenes – zines and tape trading – provided a broad stylistic pallet embodying many global developments in metal music. But due to the band’s isolation, they experienced little pressure to follow any of these movements precisely, and so their output became distinctively hybridised, bearing the qualities of many substyles. The fact that they did this while maintaining scenic authenticity and respect from their overseas contemporaries is notable. One potential justification for this could be the sense of unpredictability and untethered chaos in their public personas, as though to insinuate that their breaks from metal coding are simply symptoms of being completely socially and culturally unhinged, a quality which is clearly celebrated in much of their media coverage.³¹

The character founding Sadistik Exekution’s persona, and echoed throughout the history of Australian metal and rock more generally, is that of the Australian larrikin.³² Although a constant figure in Australian folk culture, ‘larrikin’ has meant different things in different eras, from savage urban criminality in the early nineteenth century through to a pervasive and treasured vestige of contemporary Australian culture celebrating brashness, irreverence and roguishness.³³ Larrikinism is expressed in the idiom ‘taking the piss’ – a Commonwealth expression, which describes making fun of someone or something with a friendly redress, often to bring that thing or person down to earth. In this ostensibly light-hearted manner, larrikins push incessantly at convention and good taste. The implication is that the joke may be pushed far, but it will remain essentially harmless. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such a jocular attitude (observed, too, in the work of Buffalo) deflects from a host of potentially dysfunctional behaviours, rendering them as little more than idiosyncratic quirks of the Australian national identity despite sometimes concealing and even justifying more problematic activities, such as violence, racism and misogyny. While this persona is exemplified by myriad bands in all styles of Australian music, its situation in Sadistik Exekution’s brand is particularly obvious, justifying both the band’s raucous, hysterical and uncouth public persona as well as its wanton aversion to following the codes of extreme metal authenticity. The band’s distance from the origins of its style, the methods of the music’s arrival (and consequent dissemination), and the culture surrounding and suffusing the band members’ lives all play a part in this distinctively unhinged and chaotic musical statement and its, perhaps surprising, legitimation.

Contemporary Australian Metal and Ne Obliviscaris

The eighties saw the stylistic ambit of Australian metal broaden, but it proliferated far further throughout subsequent decades to the present. Indeed, there is a theme in international metal media that Australia’s current metal offerings are notably artistically and sonically varied. While the overall output of the country matches its population, a sizable portion of these bands occupy unique and oftentimes influential positions in global metal. Bands like Northlane, Voyager, Karnivool, Psycroptic, Twelve Foot Ninja, Dispossessed, Portal and Caligula’s Horse illustrate this diversity. Some of these bands, such as Karnivool and Northlane, acted as fountainheads for burgeoning metal substyles. All occupy singular positions in Australian metal, demonstrating little creative tether to contemporaneous scenes, local or global. Some employ distinctive musical practices while some explore paramusical theming which is novel and unusual in the context of global metal. While the distance-related pressures have been different for each of these bands, many of whom experienced at least a portion of their career with the presence of the internet, their location and output reveal parallels to their forebearers, namely them being stylistically idiosyncratic and dismissive of metal codes and authenticity.

Melbourne’s Ne Obliviscaris, formed in 2003, are an interesting case study in this regard. They embody a high degree of stylistic hybridity, melding styles which would regularly be taken as incompatible in discourses of (extreme) metal authenticity (for example, black metal and progressive rock), as well as perpetuating a confident and fully formed voice from early in their career without scenic contemporaries in similar styles to emulate. Ne Obliviscaris’s music is founded in extreme metal, and numerous extreme metal substyles find place in different aspects of their music. Drummer Dan Presland foregrounds ferocious and relentless death metal-derived double kick and blast beat patterns; vocalist Xenoyr utilises both death metal-styled guttural vocals and high-pitched shrieked vocals, more redolent of black metal; guitarists Benjamin Baret and Matt Klavins employ machine gun rhythmic riffing with a lineage to thrash metal by way of death metal, as well as more colourful and chord-based black metal patterns played either harmonically or as tremolo-picked arpeggios. These approaches are manifestly wide-ranging but still situated under the umbrella of extreme metal style markers.

Of more interest, though, are the ways the band actively undermine these recognisable hybrid extreme metal qualities. Ne Obliviscaris employ a violinist, Tim Charles, who also acts as their melodic vocalist. Charles’s virtuosic violin, rather than behaving like a (reasonably normalised in metal) symphonic layer, occupies a role more akin to a lead guitar, establishing key melodies and countermelodies and acting, continuously, as an Apollonian foil to the brutality of the underlying metal music.³⁴ This is especially evident in the fiddle-like performative timbre often utilised, as well as a whole range of expressive nuances and articulations like harmonics, portamento (sliding between notes) and pizzicato (plucking with fingers rather than bowing). The fragile, human qualities of these techniques and others provide a distinctive contrast to the machine-like metal foundations of the band’s music. In a similarly creative approach, Martino Garattoni’s bass relatively rarely performs in unison with the guitars nor occupies the lower fundamental qualities of the song’s harmony. It often acts, instead, as another smooth melodic voice, foiling the music’s harshness and density. Moreover, Ne Obliviscaris generally convey the influence of non-metal musics like flamenco, Gypsy jazz and classic psychedelic and progressive rock, all compositionally situated to provoke the greatest drama by contrast to the band’s metal underpinnings.

Ne Obliviscaris sound like no other band in the metal landscape, and this uniqueness has attracted a significant underground following the world over. Regardless, the band often describe the same pressures experienced by essentially all Australian underground artists: cost of touring, less support from industry and policy in the country, and so forth.³⁵ Their answer to these oft-repeated issues was an unconventional one: crowdfunding. While the band are signed to an independent label, Season of Mist, they have, since 2016, been funded primarily by their fans through the American membership platform Patreon.³⁶ Over 700 fans, at the time of writing, contribute almost $9,000 AUD (the equivalent of around $6,500 USD) to Ne Obliviscaris each month. Although reasonably accepted now, Ne Obliviscaris were early adopters – as a metal band – of this avenue and were criticised by many for the approach at the time. The band continue to emphasise how necessary this approach has been to their longevity.³⁷

While the outrageous larrikinish character shared by Sadistik Exekution and many other Australian bands is not necessarily evident in Ne Obliviscaris’s identity, their defiance for convention is no less charged. On the one hand, their particular sonic hybrid, crystallising without scenic contemporaries or clear overseas antecedents, is brazen and original. On the other, their answer to problems catalysed by their geographical distance and underground scenic positioning is clearly built from a stubborn ingenuity, one echoed – albeit in parallel and sometimes contrasting manners – across Australian metal.

Ne Obliviscaris arguably do not embody an ‘Australian’ aspect to their sound, at least not in the same way bands like King Parrot, Twelve Foot Ninja or Dead Kelly might be said to through their direct (paramusical) employment of Australian accent and argot. This observation could be extended to many acknowledged Australian metal bands, perhaps more than the inverse, and so this marker has limited use in characterising Australian metal. Rather, what Ne Obliviscaris, Sadistik Exekution, Buffalo and many other Australian metal bands share is a negotiation with their mutual circumstances: isolation, distance from scenic hubs, and the absence of large or well-established local scenes. They also share in stubbornly surmounting these problems, often resulting in mutually inventive and novel sonic and aesthetic outcomes. In any case, these common variables have some effect on the bands’ identity and practice. Buffalo are largely characterised through their offensive and inflammatory paramusical materials, created as a response to a disinterested and conservative media and public. Sadistik Exekution are known for their tremendously heavy and out-of-control music made as a response to their estimation that pretence and authority, a pervasive target of the larrikin character, diminishes metal purity. Ne Obliviscaris forged a genuinely novel sonic hybrid and, after battling with geographical handicaps for over a decade, disseminated it through an equally novel funding platform, one which cyclically allowed and allows the band supreme freedom over their stylistic vision.

Conclusion

The history of Australian metal is dotted with novelty, with necessity driving invention and defiance plotting courses against convention. Considering just how varied, how hybrid and how singular many leading Australian metal bands are, defining common qualities is a difficult undertaking. This chapter considered, instead, some of the distance-related negotiations faced by Australian metal acts as a means of grouping and conceptualising their practice and situated this quality in the work of three key bands from across the music’s historical trajectory. While the particularities of this quality are respectively unique, negotiation with distance remains a pervasive aspect of Australian metal, one with broad and tangible ramifications across the style’s musical and paramusical developments. One cannot write the history of Australian metal without considering this ongoing negotiation.