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Book part
Publication date: 4 June 2019

Paul ‘Nazz’ Oldham

The key characteristics that eventually came to be considered to be Australian ‘heavy metal’ emerged between 1965 and 1973. These include distortion, power, intensity, extremity…

Abstract

The key characteristics that eventually came to be considered to be Australian ‘heavy metal’ emerged between 1965 and 1973. These include distortion, power, intensity, extremity, loudness and aggression. This exploration of the origins of heavy metal in Australia focusses on the key acts which provided its domestic musical foundations, and investigates how the music was informed by its early, alcohol-fuelled early audiences, sites of performance, media and record shops. Melbourne-based rock guitar hero Lobby Loyde’s classical music influence and technological innovations were important catalysts in the ‘heaviness’ that would typify Australian proto-metal in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, loud and heavy rock was firmly established as a driving force of the emerging pub rock scene. Extreme volume heavy rock was taken to the masses was Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs in the early 1970s whose triumphant headline performance at the 1972 Sunbury Pop Festival then established them as the most popular band in the nation. These underpinnings were consolidated by three bands: Sydney’s primal heavy prog-rockers Buffalo (Australia’s counterpart to Britain’s Black Sabbath), Loyde’s defiant Coloured Balls and the highly influential AC/DC, who successfully crystallised heavy Australian rock in a global context. This chapter explores how the archaeological foundations for Australian metal are the product of domestic conditions and sensibilities enmeshed in overlapping global trends. In doing so, it also considers how Australian metal is entrenched in localised musical contexts which are subject to the circulation of international flows of music and ideas.

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Australian Metal Music: Identities, Scenes, and Cultures
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-167-4

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Gender Inequality in Metal Music Production
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-674-7

Book part
Publication date: 18 December 2020

Karl Farrugia

Comedy and parody in rock and metal music have been around since the genre's inception. The Italian comedic music genre known as rock demenziale employs the use of nonsense and…

Abstract

Comedy and parody in rock and metal music have been around since the genre's inception. The Italian comedic music genre known as rock demenziale employs the use of nonsense and surrealism which turns conventions upside down. The demenziale has also attracted a slew of bands that employ this humour within the heavy metal genre, most famous of which is the Roman band Nanowar of Steel. With their jabs at Manowar and power metal bands, they place mundane activities and characters into the grandiose medievalist and fantasy worlds commonly used by those bands to the point of absurdity. However, with humour being deeply culture-specific, jokes that draw from a country's pop culture and makes extensive use of puns may be lost to an audience not familiar with that culture. Nanowar of Steel's unique position of having songs written in seven languages, primarily English and Italian, allows us to take a deeper look at how language and humour interfaces with the local and global metal scenes.

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Multilingual Metal Music: Sociocultural, Linguistic and Literary Perspectives on Heavy Metal Lyrics
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-948-9

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Book part
Publication date: 4 June 2019

Catherine Hoad

This chapter serves as the introduction to the edited collection, calling into focus the diverse ways in which ‘Australia’ is asserted in the spaces, scenes and practices of…

Abstract

This chapter serves as the introduction to the edited collection, calling into focus the diverse ways in which ‘Australia’ is asserted in the spaces, scenes and practices of Australian heavy metal. This chapter responds to earlier quandaries in the sparse research on Australian metal which question if there is anything definitively ‘Australian’ about the characteristics, themes and narratives demonstrated within Australian heavy metal scenes. In response to this challenge, the author uses this chapter to establish critical foundations for addressing how Australianness has been represented ‘Downunderground’ (Phillipov, 2008, p. 215) – historically, musically and geographically, as work in this collection affirms. This introduction foregrounds the concerns of the edited collection at large, which addresses how national identity has been imagined and constructed in ways which can at once celebrate problematic patriarchal nationalist symbolism, yet also call into focus the resistant and subversive ways in which metal scenes have deconstructed, critiqued and renegotiated the parameters of what it means to be ‘Australian’. This chapter asserts that any interrogation of the ‘Australianness’ of Australian metal must problematise the notion of a singularly ‘Australian’ identity in the first instance. Here the author argues that ‘Australian metal’ as a consolidated signifier must be problematised to instead come to an understanding of the multisited ways in which ‘Australianness’ is experienced within scenes. In doing so the author establishes the critical trajectories for the edited collection at large – to track the genealogies of Australian metal as a component in a wider global scene, and consider the plurality of its contemporary manifestations.

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Australian Metal Music: Identities, Scenes, and Cultures
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-167-4

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Metal Music and the Re-imagining of Masculinity, Place, Race and Nation
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-444-1

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Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-925-6

Book part
Publication date: 4 June 2019

Samuel Whiting, Paige Klimentou and Ian Rogers

Masculinity and heavy metal share a clear and well-documented relationship, with many of the key texts on metal centering around its representation of gender (Walser, 1993;…

Abstract

Masculinity and heavy metal share a clear and well-documented relationship, with many of the key texts on metal centering around its representation of gender (Walser, 1993; Weinstein, 1991). Less discussed is masculinity in Australian metal, as Australian metal itself remains underrepresented in scholarly research. In this chapter we discuss the music, media and image of Parkway Drive – a popular metalcore band from Byron Bay, Australia – via a reading of two of the band’s feature-length rockumentary films. We draw on concepts and theories of gender (Butler, 2006), and public image (Leonard, 2007), as well as studies of Australian masculinity, specifically those pertaining to mateship, surfing, and adventurousness. As the metalcore subgenre has not been widely studied, this approach provides a basis for understanding the subgenre as well as its relationship to gender, commercial success, and Australian heavy metal, focussing on the decidedly Anglo-Australian representation of masculinity performed by Parkway Drive. We argue that the band typifies a distinctly Australian type of hegemonic masculinity, one that draws on discussion of Australian identity, beach culture and surfing. We further examine the band’s use of ‘rockumentary’ tropes to build their public image and to tighten affective bonds with viewers.

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Australian Metal Music: Identities, Scenes, and Cultures
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-167-4

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 6 September 2019

Ross Hagen

This chapter explores the potential for musical medievalism within metal, exploring the ways in which metal musicians have sought to include ‘authentic’ medieval musical languages…

Abstract

This chapter explores the potential for musical medievalism within metal, exploring the ways in which metal musicians have sought to include ‘authentic’ medieval musical languages within their music. The medieval repertoire poses many challenges even for early music specialists, and the musical idioms of metal and medieval music rarely overlap, leading many medievalist metal bands to rely instead on normative metal styles with occasional references to specific identifiable melodies. The chapter focusses particularly on the American metal band Obsequiae, who have drawn inspiration particularly from the medieval polyphonic repertoire, which required creating much more oblique musical connections. Obsequiae’s albums feature acoustic guitar and harp arrangements of medieval polyphonic works, but their metal songs likewise adopt some general qualities of medieval polyphony. The obscure nature of the connections is likely beyond many listeners, but paradoxically the lack of obvious musical medievalism can also cultivate the appearance of a deeper connection.

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Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-395-7

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Book part
Publication date: 23 August 2019

Eleanor Peters

Abstract

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The Use and Abuse of Music: Criminal Records
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-002-8

Book part
Publication date: 30 September 2010

Ben Hutcherson and Ross Haenfler

While authenticity, gender, and genre have all been studied in relation to music, the links between the three are underdeveloped theoretically. Specifically, the ongoing gendered…

Abstract

While authenticity, gender, and genre have all been studied in relation to music, the links between the three are underdeveloped theoretically. Specifically, the ongoing gendered process of constructing authenticity and the role of gendered authenticity in the creation and articulation of new musical genres remain fairly unexplored. In particular, more work is necessary to explain the role of gender in the emergence of new subgenres, in the ongoing maintenance of genre boundaries, and in fans' identity work as they construct “authentic” participation in “underground” scenes. In this paper, we examine genre as a gendered process in the Extreme Metal (EM) music scene, a popular subgenre of heavy metal. We explore several gendered dimensions of the EM genre, including the music (instrumentation, vocal style, lyrics, record covers, merchandise), live performance (gender distribution and arrangement, moshing/dancing, audience/crowd interaction), and embodied genre performance (fashion, hair style, makeup). We conclude by suggesting that the construction of new subgenres is, in part, a process of reestablishing and valorizing masculine traits, denigrating feminine traits, and connecting such traits to authenticity, thereby perpetuating gender inequality and hegemonic masculinities.

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Studies in Symbolic Interaction
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-361-4

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