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Introduction * In the catacombs ofa nineteenth-century warehouse, hulking in a rundown riverfront district, passageways wind through rough stonework to connect small rooms, each fronted by a sturdy iron door. Behind these doors musicians compose and rehearse through all hours of the day and night. Wandering the crooked hallways, I hear waves of sound clashing and coalescing: powerful drums and bass, menacing and ecstatic vocals, the heavy crunch of distorted electric guitars. In some rooms, lone guitarists practice scales, arpeggios, heavy metal riffs, and Bach transcriptions. Occasionally, I pass an open door, and musicians who are taking a break consider my presence with cool curiosity. I am struck by the resemblance ofthese underground rehearsal spaces to the practice rooms ofa conservatory. The decor is different, but the people are similar: musicians in their late teens and early twenties, assembled for long hours of rigorous practice. There is a parallel sense of isolation for the sake ofmusical craft and creativity, a kindred pursuit of technical development and group precision. And like conservatory students , many of these heavy metal musicians take private lessons, study music theory, and practice scales and exercises for hours every day. They also share the precarious economic future faced by classical musicians; in both cases, few will ever make enough money performing to compensate them for the thousands ofhours they have practiced and rehearsed. There are important differences from the conservatory environment, too, not the least ofwhich is the grungy setting itself, which underlines the fact that this music does not enjoy institutional prestige or receive governmental subsidy. The musicians must pool their funds to pay for rental ofthe rooms, and the long hair that marks them as members ofa heavy metal subculture also ensures that they are not likely to have access to jobs that pay well. On the other hand, many ofthese people are actuIntroduction / ix ally working as musicians, at least part-time. Unlike most of their peers in the academy, they know a great deal about the commercial channels to which they hope to gain access. Some talk ofnot compromising their art for popular success, but there is little evidence of the music academy's pretense that art can be pursued apart from commerce. This is in part because they are more closely connected with their potential audiences, through their own fan activities and those of their friends, while relatively few aspiring classical musicians actually belong to the moneyed class that underwrites the performance of classical music. Heavy metal musicians are, in fact, strongly influenced by the practices of the musical academy, but their activities also retain the priorities of collective creation and orality derived from traditions of popular music making. The noisy vaults of that warehouse and the musicians who haunt them evoke images and raise issues that will be central to my discussions ofheavy metal. Ifmetal could be said to have gotten started in any single place, it would be Birmingham, England, the industrial city whose working class spawned Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest in the late I960s and early I970s. That heavy metal bands now labor in spaces abandoned by industry is particularly appropriate for a music that has flourished during the period ofAmerican deindustrialization. And just as the labor of industrial production is invisible in mass media representations of consumer products, the musical labor that sustains and reinvents mass-mediated popular music often takes place in such marginallocations . Heavy metal is perhaps the single most successful and enduring musical genre ofthe past thirty years; yet it is in such dank cellars that many of its future stars serve their apprenticeships. This noisy basement is a good analogy for the position heavy metal occupies in the edifice ofcultural prestige. When I began writing about heavy metal in 1986, it seemed a strange thing for a cultural critic-let alone a musicologist-to do. Metal has been ignored or reviled, not only by academics of all stripes but even by most rock critics. Yet in the United States and many other countries, heavy metal was arguably the most important and influential musical genre ofthe 1980s; throughout the decade, it became increasingly clear that, between them, hip hop and heavy metal were redefining American popular music. Moreover, the debates surrounding heavy metal and the people who make it-over meaQing, character, behavior, values, censorship, violence, alienation, and community-mark metal as an important site ofcultural contestation. This is most obvious when attacks come from groups with overt moral missions, such as...

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