Mapping Social-Class Divisions within Metal: Global Material Conditions, Disciplinary Priorities, Subgeneric Trends, and Stylistic Analyses

Regarding social class and genre, one might frame metal music as occupying a middle ground between punk at one extreme and progressive rock at the other. Histories of these genres in 1960s and 1970s England reveal broad, material differences between the livelihoods of their musicians and audiences in terms of vocation, education, and economic security (Frith & Horne, 1987, Art into Pop. Methuen; DeCurtis et al., 1976/1992, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (3rd rev. ed.). Random House.; Brackett, 2005, 183, 283, The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader. Oxford University Press). Subtler, class divisions related to aesthetics can similarly be traced in the proletarian music criticism of Lester Bangs and Creem magazine in opposition to the populism of Rolling Stone (Brackett, 2005, 232, The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader. Oxford University Press; Gendron, 2002, 227–247, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. University of Chicago Press). Perhaps subtler still are the traces of class divisions found in recordings, which reflect distinctions of taste (Bourdieu, 1979/1984, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press) rooted in oppositions of tradition/experimentation, community/individualism, sincerity/irony, and hiding/celebrating technology (Keightley, 2001, 137, Reconsidering Rock. In S. Frith, W. Straw, & J. Street (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (pp. 109–142). Cambridge University Press). While it has been common for older metal studies especially to position the genre as a blue-collar phenomenon (Weinstein, 1991/2000, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. Da Capo Press; Berger, 1999a, Popular Music, 18(2), 161–178, 1999b, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. University Press of New England), multiple others have since problematized or nuanced that characterization (Baulch, 2003, Popular Music, 22(2), 195–215; Halnon, 2004, Critical Sociology, 30, 743–779; Hein, 2003, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Metal: Histoire, Culture et pratiquants. IRMA, Mélanie Séteun; Kahn-Harris, 2007, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Berg Publishers; Smialek, 2008, Rethinking Metal Aesthetics: Complexity, Authenticity, and Audience in Meshuggah’s I and Catch Thirtythr33. MA thesis, McGill University; Berger, 2014, Foreword to Walser, 1993/2014, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Wesleyan University Press; Brown & Griffin, 2014, The Sociological Review, 62, 719–741; Brown, 2016, Un(su)stained Class? Figuring out the Identity Politics of Heavy Metal’s Demographics. In A. R. Brown, K. Spracklen, K. Kahn-Harris, & N. W. R. Scott (Eds.), Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies (pp. 190–206). Routledge; Guibert & Guibert, 2016, The Social Characteristics of the Contemporary Metalhead: The Hellfest Survey. In A. R. Brown, K. Spracklen, K. Kahn-Harris, & N. W. R. Scott (Eds.), Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies (pp. 167–189). Routledge).

Material differences, written discourses, and musical recordings—my chapter uses these three contexts to map out key differences in how class labels apply to particular contexts within the global metal scene. Beginning with a survey of the existing secondary literature, I review geographical differences in material class relationships that metal scholars have established. Deindustrialized Ohio (Berger, 1999a, Popular Music, 18(2), 161–178, 1999b, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. University Press of New England) and Birmingham, UK (Cope, 2010, Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music. Ashgate), for instance, contrast with the middle-class scenes found in economically stable regions like France (Hein, 2003, 226, 228, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Metal: Histoire, Culture et pratiquants. IRMA, Mélanie Séteun). Two broad global contexts emerge: one in economically stable countries, where class tensions around modernity occur mostly in regions with shifts in labor opportunity, and another context in global regions of instability, where class dynamics are complicated by factors such as ambivalence towards former colonizing cultures. Drawing upon expert essays on these regions recently published in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (Herbst, ed. 2023, The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music. Cambridge University Press), I explore how class relationships differ in these contexts from the ones pertaining to the Global North more traditionally emphasized in metal studies. Turning to discourse analysis, I outline some trends in metal scholarship toward priorities and emphases that I argue are implicitly classed. White-collar trends can be found in the continuous interest in musical complexity that motivate music theory articles on the progressive metal band Meshuggah (Pieslak, 2007, Music Theory Spectrum, 29(2), 219–245; Lucas, 2018, Music Theory Online, 24(3), 2021, Music Theory Online, 27(4); Capuzzo, 2018, Music Theory Spectrum, 40(1), 121–137; Hannan, 2018, Metal Music Studies, 4(3), 433–458). More blue-collar explanations for metal’s appeal such as catharsis, frustration, and empowerment are more obvious threads throughout conference calls for papers, the Metal Studies Bibliography hosted by the International Association for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), and article topics published in the journal Metal Music Studies. To show the intersectional significance of this division, I compare demographic data on the membership of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) with broader demographic surveys around post-secondary education that the SMT has aggregated. Thus, an interest especially in class-related experiences of metal maps onto intersectional identities and disciplinary fields most concerned with countering hegemony. Lastly, to shed light on a seldom acknowledged side of class and metal, I present new music analyses that reflect what Smialek and St-Laurent (2019, Unending Eruptions: White-Collar Metal Appropriations of Classical Complexity, Experimentation, Elitism, and Cultural Legitimization. In C. Scotto, K. Smith, & J. Brackett (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches (pp. 378–398). Routledge University Press) call white-collar aesthetics in extreme metal: After the Burial’s “Pi (The Mercury God of Infinite)” (2006) and a one-time collaboration between YouTuber Dave Brown (pseud. boyinaband) and physics professor Phil Moriarty on “Phi” (2012).

In addition to new music analyses and new evidence for white-collar sensibilities in metal, this chapter offers an especially broad account of class-based divisions in metal as they occur in its widely ranging contexts and discourses.