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T H R E E Heavy Metal in Akron, Ohio Winter's Bane and Sin-Eater In this chapter, I move from northeast Ohio's commercial hard rock scene to its metal scene. As before, my dual goals are to present a general introduction to the music and to understand how both the meanings of metal and the socialorganization of its subcultures are the outcome of the participant's constitutive practices.While the meanings of contemporary commercial hard rock and underground metal differ greatly, their common origin in the rock musics of the late 19605 has left both sceneswith similar categories of practice: group or leader/composer composition, nightclub performance, promotion, and casual social interaction. But the metalscene is constituted through a varietyof practices not found in commercial hard rock, and the stylistic differences and subcultural divisionswithin metal are far more complex than those in rock. While I am interested in all of the varieties of underground metal and allpracticesthat constitute the scenes, my focus is on death metal and the practices of nightclub performance. We gain our first entrance into the social life of metal by exploring the history of this music. History and social organization of Ohio's metalunderground The metalheads of northeast Ohio are nothing if not enthusiastic exegetes , and they delighted in providing me with a detailed description of metal history. A living element of the metalheads' present experiences, this history can provide us with a first entrance into the contemporary scene. Almost without exception, the metalheads depict the history of their music in a progressive fashion, moving from metal's initial break with the T H E E T H N O G R A P H Y O F M U S I C A L P R A C T I C E / 5 6 perceived chirpy banalities of commercial rock to its steady achievement of ever-greater heights of emotional intensity. Releasing their first album in 1970, Black Sabbath was credited by all of my research participants as the originators of metal. The band brought elaborate compositions, aggressive drumming, heavily distorted guitars, themes of fantasy and the occult, and aggressive or morose affects into a constellation of features that has been the touchstone of metal to this day. Perceived as both more musically sophisticated and more emotionally intense than the mainstream rock of its day, Black Sabbath is spoken of with awe by all the metalheads I interviewed . Sometimes called power metal, progressive metal, or the second wave of British metal, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden broke new ground in the late 19705. Rob Halford, singer for Judas Priest, explored new territory by deploying a huge vocal range and an array of vocal timbres that ran the gamut from the pure to the growly, from the whispery to the piercing. (After the period of my research, one of the participants in this study, Timmy Owens, later went on to replace Halford as the lead singer inJudas Priest; see Chapter 5.) Iron Maiden pushed the boundaries of 19705 metal with ever more elaborate two-guitar arrangements and longer instrumental sections. Born of its initial rejection of pop, metal's virtuosity has always been crucial to its evocation of power and aggression, but the 19805 saw metal reach ever new heights of emotional intensity by borrowing the raw energy of punk. While the punk and metal scenes were quite distinct in the 19705, some 19805 bands moved back and forth across the border and manylisteners kept in touch with both scenes. As Donna Gaines observes in Teenage Wasteland (1990, 194-204), the early 19805 thrash bands were the first products of such interactions, combing metal guitar sounds with low, gruff vocals to bring a raw new aggression to metal. Speed metal followed quickly on its heels; playing at accelerated tempos, these bands fused the frenetic energy of punk with some of the lyricalthemes and chord progressions of metal. By today's standards, speed metal was slow, and it quickly gave way to grindcore with its even more accelerated tempi. Death metal, the focus of much of this book, began in the mid-1980s and refers to avariety of styles characterizedby noisy, unpitched vocals. The subdivisions of death metal refer less to discrete scenes than to styles and themes. For example , black metal refers to bands that explicitlydiscuss Satanism; contrary to popular misconception, black metal is a relatively small part of the metal scene and most metalheads are in no way connected with Satanism.1...

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