Heavy Metal Music in Britain (review)

This is an exciting time to be intellectually interested in heavy metal. Susan Fast's book on Led Zeppelin combined musical analysis, ethnography, and phenomenology and other cultural theory in an illuminating study of how bodily performance, gender and sexuality, sounds, and symbols create meaning for fans and musicians (Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001]). Harry Berger's exploration of metal and jazz also used phenomenology and ethnography, with an emphasis on how musicians themselves account for their music (Harris M. Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience [Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999]). Glenn Pillsbury's study of Metallica concentrated on how the physicality of performance interacts with cultural narratives of race, orientalism, and musical signification (Glenn T. Pillsbury, Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of Musical Identity [New York: Routledge, 2006]). Steve Waksman's treatment of "cock rock" merged sophisticated cultural theory with musical specificity to explore the complex positioning of men and women with respect to music that simultaneously perpetuates sexism and produces liberatory feelings (Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999]). And Keith Kahn-Harris contributed smart cultural analysis and a global approach to metal (Keith Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge [Oxford: Berg, 2007]).

Although it claims to be bringing the "budding scene" of heavy metal studies together with cultural studies, Heavy Metal Music in Britain does not build on this rich body of work. Fast, Berger, and Pillsbury are appropriately cited as important in the editor's introduction, but the first two are hardly mentioned again in the book, and the third not at all; Waksman is cited only once. No scholars affiliated with a music department are included among the contributors, and that introduction, apparently without irony, is called "Doing Cultural Studies with Earplugs."

The book's least impressive chapter was authored by its best-known scholar: heavy metal, Deena Weinstein argues, is all about power, not masculinity, and the two are un-related: "It is British heavy metal's affirmative core that insures that its interpretation of 'masculinity' is free standing and not anchored in invidious comparisons based on gender and sexual orientation." Metal celebrates the active life, and "Nietzsche, not Freud or his feminist revisionists, is the presiding genius of British heavy metal" (p. 28). Nietzsche! That fierce opponent of women's emancipation and autonomy, the famous misogynist who argued that women can't know truth and have no perspective, who suggested that "When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Preface to a Philosophy of the Future. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: The Modern Library, 1968], 279). In order to mount this preposterous thesis, Weinstein simply ignores most previous scholarship on heavy metal and gender, even her own, which included this sensible statement: "Power, the essential inherent and delineated meaning of heavy metal, is culturally coded as a masculine trait" (Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology [New York: Lexington Books, 1991], 67).

Most of the other chapters feature excessive quotation, uncritical use of sources, documentation of the obvious, little recognition of sound and specificity, and citation of lyrics to prove points that are obvious. The authors spend too much space arguing with other scholars and too little on original, insightful analysis of musical practices.

However, two chapters stand out as valuable contributions. Iain Campbell brings to bear an original perspective and genuine expertise in another field in his study of heavy metal's uses of the classical world, real, mythic, and imagined. He deals only with lyrics, but his work is illuminating and generative. And Ryan M. Moore analyzes parallels between the social crises of the 1970s and 1980s, the period of deindustrialization within which heavy metal...