Heavy Metal Music in Britain

Heavy Metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer-good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, Heavy Metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, Heavy Metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse.

This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British Heavy Metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalisation and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British Heavy Metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analyses of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of Heavy Metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analyses that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture.

CONTENIDO

Introduction: reading heavy metal as cultural text (Gerd Bayer)

Part 1 - Metal Commodities:
The empowering masculinity of British heavy metal (Deena Weinstein)
Metal goes 'pop': the explosion of heavy metal into the mainstream (Benjamin Earl)
The brutal truth: Grindcore as the extreme realism of British heavy metal (Liam Francis Dee.

Part 2 - The Literary and Mythological Heritage:
Demons, devils and witches: the occult in heavy metal music (Helen Farley)
Images of human-wrought despair and destruction: social critique in British apocalyptic and dystopian metal (Laura Wiebe Taylor)
From Achilles to Alexander: the classical world and the world of metal (Iain Campbell)
Elements of gothic literature in heavy metal: a match made in Hell (Bryan A. Bardine.

Part 3 - Heavy Metal Societies:
The unmaking of the English working class: deindustrialization, reification, and the origins of heavy metal (Ryan Moore)
No class? Class in Motörhead lyrics (Magnus Nilsson)
Rocking the nation: identity formation in heavy metal (Gerd Bayer)

Index