TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract Heavy metal music has had a long relationship with environmental and ecological concerns, one that can be traced as far back as Black Sabbath’s ‘Into the Void’ (1971). Academic work has, however, been slow to recognise the entanglements of metal, environment and ecology in either the global or an Australian context. More recently, however, popular music scholars have begun to acknowledge how the sonic anger of black, death and other genres of extreme metal might be an appropriate medium for social and environmental commentary and protest (Lucas, 2015, p. 555). Therefore, according to Wiebe-Taylor (2009), metal’s ‘darker side is not simply about shock tactics and sensory overload…’, because, ‘metal also makes use of its harsh lyrics, sounds and visual imagery to express critical concerns about human behaviour and decision making and anxieties about the future’ (p. 89). Taking an ecocritical approach, this chapter will map and analyse the environmental concerns and ecological anxieties of Australian metal across a range of different bands and metal genres, as they emerge through three ‘dead-end’ discourses-misanthrophism, apocalypticism, Romanticism – which offer little or no hope of survival.
SN  - 978-1-78769-167-4, 978-1-78769-168-1/
DO  - 10.1108/978-1-78769-167-420191015
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78769-167-420191015
AU  - Collinson Ian
ED  - Catherine Hoad
PY  - 2019
Y1  - 2019/01/01
TI  - ‘This is the Funeral of the Earth’: The ‘Dead-end’ Environmental Discourses of Australian Ecometal
T2  - Australian Metal Music: Identities, Scenes, and Cultures
T3  - Emerald Studies in Metal Music and Culture
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 129
EP  - 144
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -