Session 6: Cultural Legitimation of Metal

Mercury Rising! Exploring the Recent Cultural Legitimation of Heavy Metal Music It now seems indisputable that the genre of heavy metal—once viewed as the exemplar par excellence of low culture and the disreputable in popular music—has been subject to an unprecedented process of cultural accreditation in recent years. For example: the critical and commercial success of the investigative documentary, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005), which received widespread release and significant box office returns; the publication of the book, Extreme Metal (2007) by Keith Kahn-Harris, which has received sympathetic reviews but also unprecedented sales for an academic text; the fan-initiated archive of memorabilia, The Home of Metal (2007), championed by West Midland’s Capsule arts media (Trilling 2007), culminating in the UK Lottery and Arts Council funded, Home of Metal Project, a summer-long series of exhibitions and events, involving prominent band members of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Napalm Death, and art installations and sculpture produced by Turner-prize nominated artists, which was extensively covered in the UK “quality” press during 2011; the convening of the First Global Conference on Metal Music and Politics (2008), in Salzburg, Austria, which received coverage in the UK Guardian newspaper and in the metal press (Metal Hammer, September 2008); the Heavy Metal and Gender Congress, held at the University of Cologne in 2009, involving academic papers but also included a roundtable discussion by prominent female-metal performers, filmed and extensively covered in the German magazine, Metal Hammer; and the black metal theory symposium, held in Brooklyn, New York in 2009, and reported in the The New York Times (Ratliff 2009). Most recently, there was the Heavy Metal and Popular Culture Conference, held at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and reported on the front-page of The Wall Street Journal (14th April 2013). If, as (the late, great) Stuart Hall argued, the cultural politics that configure the relationship between high and low cultural forms resembles that of an “escalator” in what one would have to imagine as a very post-modern department store, then metal’s cultural capital is rising, floor by floor (Brown and Fellezs 2012: x). However, this clever metaphor should also draw our attention to the idea that not only is cultural legitimacy about hierarchies of “symbolic” value but that movement up or down such hierarchies is a social and cultural process that involves strategies, tactics and the exercise of symbolic power. Drawing on the theoretical vocabulary of Bourdieu and others, this panel seeks to explore this process of cultural legitimation or what Gendron (2002) calls cultural accreditation, as a way of illuminating the changing relations between heavy metal and the academy/elite cultural criticism and the way this process is both reflected and refracted within the changing subcultural value systems or fan hierarchies that constitute heavy metal as a social and cultural phenomenon, revealing hitherto unrecognized areas of conflict, contestation and dissensus. Each of the papers offered here explores these “conflicts of legitimation” to be found in debates among metallectuals both within and outside the academy, high and middle-brow media, fan forums, discussion boards, and internet-wide social media sites. Andy R. Brown: Revenge of the Metal-univore or Rise of the Metal-omnivore? Exploring Changes in the Legitimacy of having a \u27taste for classical music and heavy metal\u27” Recent research exploring Peterson’s ‘cultural omnivore’ thesis—that predicted the decline, or transformation, of traditional ‘snob’ cultures organized around a preference for legitimate or ‘high culture’ (such as a liking for classical music and opera found among the elite/highly educated) in favor of a model of greater multi-cultural tolerance—have noted a ‘surprising’ (and highly unexpected) preference for heavy metal among graduates. For example, Savage (2006), summarizing the findings from a recent UK study of musical tastes, states: ‘liking for classical music is negatively correlated with liking for all the other musical genres except jazz [and] (very surprisingly!) heavy metal’ (p.165), concluding that ‘the highly educated middle classes are no longer just fans of classical music. They are now also devotees of rock and jazz [and] to some extent, of heavy metal’ (p.173). Or as Warde et al observe: ‘Many items – perhaps, most notably […] Heavy Metal – which would previously be seen as decidedly beyond the pale of refined tastes, are now consumed more by the highly educated’ (2008: 164). The reason for the inclusion of the genre of ‘heavy metal’ in the survey (with rock, jazz, world, classical, C & W, electronic, urban) is due to the impact of Bryson’s (1996) “Anything but heavy metal” paper which showed that, while the highly-educated had become more tolerant of ethnic-minority-identified-musics (reggae, rhythm and/or blues, world), they demonstrated an active dislike of genres identified with the lower-educated, including heavy metal, country and rap. Investigating this apparent transformation in the cultural legitimacy of the genre, this paper offers a case study that explores the cultural-mediation of a social-psychology study that reported a distinct preference for heavy metal among a sample of Educationally Gifted Young People, as it went ‘viral’ across UK middle and highbrow-newspapers, social-media platforms and the World-Wide-Web. Examining, in particular, why metal fans ‘liked’, commented-on and re-posted the story, tells us some interesting things about changing cultural-hierarchies within metal culture itself, as well as its changing relation with traditional cultural-hierarchies outside of it. Kevin Fellezs: Shredding the Color Line: The Racial Politics of Metal Guitar Virtuosity in Metal Music Studies This paper looks at a number of African American metal guitarists—Tony MacAlpine, Greg Howe, Tosin Abasi, Vernon Reid, Bibi McGill, Malina Moye—as a way to think through two interrelated discourses: one is concerned with the ways in which these guitarists destabilize conventional ideas regarding race and virtuosity in metal; and the other considers the ways in which those challenges might shape the legitimization of metal music within academe. While these guitarists contest essentialist and primitivist notions regarding black creativity, simultaneously tackling the limits of genre on their musicking, they also represent a challenge to metal music studies. Their inclusion into the field should lead us to consider the ways in which our research, publications, and pedagogical practices permit or inhibit a broader, more inclusive rendering of metal music culture. For example, Bibi McGill and Malina Moye are black female guitarists working in ways that challenge the ways in which gender, virtuosity, the guitar, and metal music have been constructed as spaces of white male priority. While succumbing in some ways to conventional notions of metal guitarists, their racialization and gendered positioning call into question some of the most fundamental assumptions regarding metal music culture. By calling on Pierre Bourdieu, Howard Becker, Lawrence Levine, and Paul Lopes in their theorization of the processes by which cultural forms achieve academic (and broader social) legitimization, I mean to reflect on the ways in which such achievement holds both the promise of intellectual recognition as well as the peril of alienated examination