Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780822347163)

During the past three decades, heavy metal music has gone global, becoming a potent source of meaning and identity for fans around the world. In Metal Rules the Globe, ethnographers and some of the foremost authorities in the burgeoning field of metal studies analyze this dramatic expansion of heavy metal music and culture. They take readers inside metal scenes in Brazil, Canada, China, Easter Island, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Malta, Nepal, Norway, Singapore, Slovenia, and the United States, describing how the sounds of heavy metal and the meanings that metalheads attribute to them vary across cultures. The contributors explore the dynamics of masculinity, class, race, and ethnicity in metal scenes; the place of metal in the music industry; and the ways that disenfranchised youth use metal to negotiate modernity and social change. They reveal heavy metal fans as just as likely to criticize the consumerism, class divisiveness, and uneven development of globalization as they are to reject traditional cultural norms. Crucially, they never lose sight of the sense of community and sonic pleasure to be experienced in the distorted, pounding sounds of local metal scenes.

Contributors. Idelber Avelar, Albert Bell, Dan Bendrups, Harris M. Berger, Paul D. Greene, Ross Hagen, Sharon Hochhauser, Shuhei Hosokawa, Keith Kahn-Harris, Kei Kawano, Rajko Mursič, Steve Waksman, Jeremy Wallach, Robert Walser, Deena Weinstein, Cynthia P. Wong

Author: Jeremy Wallach
ISBN-10: 0822347164
ISBN-13: 9780822347163
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/27/2011
Pages: 392
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.20w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2012