Emerald Studies in Metal Music and Culture – serie

For over four decades, scholars have been investigating male dominance - both symbolically and numerically -within popular music. The heavier genres of popular music, metal music in particular, have been male dominated spaces, which are difficult to navigate for women participating as fans, musicians, or both. Studies on gender inequality in metal music have convincingly demonstrated how gender dynamics shape the reception of metal music and metal scenes all over the globe. Yet, they shed relatively little light on the extent of and reasons for metal music's male domination from a production perspective. This book fills this gap, offering is a systematic and large-scale overview of gender inequality in metal music production. In other words: how many women - compared to men - are participating in metal bands and what are the causes for the differences in participation?

Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss weaves together trauma, black metal performance and disability into a story of both pain and freedom. Drawing on her years as a black metal guitarist, Jasmine Hazel Shadrack uses autoethnography to explore her own experiences of gender-based violence, misogyny, and the healing power of performance.This profoundly personal book offers a detailed explanation of autoethnography, followed by a careful exposition of the relationship between metal and gender, considering - among other things - how women are engaged with by metal music culture. After examining the various waves of black metal and how this has impacted black metal theory, the book moves on to consider female performers and performance as catharsis, including a discussion of the author's work as guitarist and vocalist with the black metal band Denigrata and her alter-ego, the 'antlered priestess' Denigrata Herself. The book concludes with some thoughts on acquired disability, freedom and peace.The book includes a foreword from eminent gender researcher Rosemary Lucy Hill, a guest section from metal scholar Amanda DiGioia, an epilogue from Rebecca Lamont-Jiggens (a legal pracademic specialising in disability), suggestions of sources of help for those in abusive relationships and further reading for those wishing to learn more about black metal theory.

Metal is a form of popular music. Popular music is a form of leisure. In the modern age, popular music has become part of popular culture, a heavily contested collection of practices and industries that construct place, belonging and power. The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House has shown that angry white men still wield huge social and cultural power in this new century. The aim of this monograph is to explore metal music - might be seen as leisure spaces that resist the norms and values of the mainstream; but also how they might also serve to re-affirm and construct those norms and values. In particular, this book is interested in how forms of metal might work to re-imagine masculinity, race, nation and class in an intersectional way through the myth of warrior masculinity and blood and soil. This monograph explores the history of the myths, and the reaction by fans to the music. The focus is extended to bands that use the warrior-nation myth in places and countries beyond the global North, and in ways that challenge or subvert hegemony.