3-Minute Thesis 2021: Heavy Metal as Existentialist Culture

Описание: This is a summary of my thesis as it stands following nearly 9 months of research. Script below:

Heavy metal, a cultural form considered dead on arrival, refuses to die. It has persisted for over fifty years, and scholars have been writing about it for over thirty. In that time it has been the subject of many moral panics, generated countless cultural artefacts and spread across all manner of geographic and social boundaries. Scholars have explored metal as a youth culture, a form of music, an aesthetic, a form of resistance, a form of nationalism, a global community, a means of social control. The question of what heavy metal signifies, in a macro, philosophical-historical sense, has appeared to resist a holistic answer; in the past decade it has become more common to focus on specific metal subgenres or scenes, rather than approach the complex whole. Some core themes have been identified so far - power, otherness, community and immanence have become consensus in academia. However significant tensions remain in metal studies, particularly regarding the often contradictory positions held by musicians and fans. I intend to show that these tensions can be overcome by situating metal as more than a musical culture.

I argue, following a brief comment from Deena Weinstein, one of the first metal sociologists, that heavy metal culture resembles philosophical existentialism. This can be seen in a staggering range of modes, discourses and cultural works within metal, most obviously shown through the culture's utter fascination with death, mortality, destruction and decay. Even the more hedonistic and upbeat subgenres of metal, such the 1980s glam style, exhibit a profound closeness to death. Further, heavy metal consistently elevates existentialist values such as freedom, individualism, critical thought, and authenticity, especially in relation to struggle. Additionally, it seems that certain existentialist authors are particularly applicable to specific metal subgenres. Finally and crucially, there are strong parallels between the contradictory and ambiguous nature of existentialist subjectivity, and the many paradoxes that typify metal fandom and scholarship. Adopting this existentialist framing accommodates the collective work of previous scholars, whilst affirming noted ambiguities as vital to the existence of heavy metal, rather than as problematic.

However, heavy metal's links to existentialism are not explicitly or dogmatically communicated within the culture; these messages are implicitly present in the culture's creative, social and receptive discourses. To support my hypothesis I will engage directly with the fans and musicians that make metal, asking one question - what does metal mean to them? - and letting their stories unfold. This will combine with analyses of metal artifice and socioeconomic structure to show the widespread acceptance and advocacy of existentialist concepts and narratives in metal, communicated through the culture's everyday vernacular. Not only will this project attempt to cohere metal scholarship and propose a unifying theory for the subfield, it aims to reveal heavy metal for the thing it was all along; a culture faced by a collapse in meaning (the advent of postmodernity in the late 1960s) that responds with the last remaining metanarrative - that we will all die.