Stephen Hudson, “How Metallica Created Extreme Metal: Battle Jackets, Connoisseurship,
and Cover Songs as Genre Work”
This paper cross-references close analysis of Metallica’s musical utterances (timbres, guitar
techniques, cover songs, and original compositions) with their “battle jackets” full of patches
advertising their favorite bands and their actions and verbal discourse as fans, collectors, and
tastemakers, in order to build a picture of how their thrash metal style and the nascent extreme
metal ideology of progressionism grew out of their selection, imitation, and iteration of songs
and styles from the preceding New Wave of British Heavy Metal. I draw on Eric Drott’s theory
(2013) of genre as grouping, and Diana Taylor’s theory (2003) that performances are “acts of
transfer” for “repertoires” of embodied knowledge that is inevitably changed as it is recalled
and reenacted, to show how Metallica gradually changed the NWOBHM as they cited it. As
fans, Metallica’s members created their own selections of the fastest and heaviest NWOBHM
bands, promoting a heavier and faster vision of the genre before they even recorded a note of
their own music. They then selected some of the fastest and heaviest NWOBHM songs, and
made them even faster and heavier in their own cover versions. I show how their small changes
in speed and articulation of certain riffs and techniques created more substantial qualitative
shifts that gradually became the characteristic elements of their own original compositions, in a
new style that would eventually be called “thrash metal.” By combining and synthesizing
observations about the mundane and musical dimensions of Metallica’s engagement with the
NWOBHM, this paper shows how style change and genre creation can occur gradually and
cumulatively, through the kinds of things that everyday fans and musicians do, rather than
some kind of grand, genius, visionary, big-idea concept.
Akiko Konishi, “Game Changers in Rock: An Immersive Experience in Visual-kei Metal
Music and Fashion”
This session will examine the Visual-kei metal movement as a significant phenomenon in
both musical and sociohistorical contexts. It will articulate how the genre reshaped the concept of
identity in relation to gender and performance art, as bands like X Japan and Luna Sea challenged
traditional gender norms by combining elements of feminine and masculine aesthetics.
Through a hair-to-toe demonstration of customary V-kei metal performance attire, and a piano
performance and analysis of selected works, the session will explore various global and cultural factors
that influenced the compositional and presentational styles of representative artists. In addition, the
session will invite listeners to experience (try on) the outfits and discuss how the genre embraced the
idiosyncrasies of pairing “heavy” music with feminine stage attire, in a similar manner to the traditional
Japanese aesthetics of Kabuki and Noh. Featured artists will include David Bowie, Cheap Trick, Mötley
Crüe, Glay, Buck-Tick, Luna Sea, and X Japan.
Sadie Sartini Garner, “Painted Handmaidens of Death: Black Metal’s Queer Authenticity”
“Only Black is true, only Death is real!!! Gore is trend!” So writes Pelle Ohlin—better known as
Dead, one-time singer for foundational Norwegian black metal band Mayhem—in a letter to a
likeminded fan. “Gore” was how Ohlin and others in the black metal scene referred to what the
rest of the world called “death metal,” the brutal, technical form of extreme music ascendant in
the late 1980s and early 1990s against which bands like Mayhem and Darkthrone defined
themselves. To these young Scandinavian metalheads, the slasher-movie aesthetics of death
metal were nothing more than a passing fad, and, as such, were ultimately insincere, no matter
how disgusting their album covers might be. If the “wimps” who were “jumping on the Death
metal bandwagon” ever saw a real corpse, Ohlin writes, they would “shit their pants.” True to his
ethos, Ohlin was known to inhale the stench of dead crows before performing to keep death in
the fore of his mind.
Black metal’s insistence on authenticity—on treating its music as a kind of social
documentary—would eventually lead to a total erasure of the line between art and reality with
Dead’s death by suicide, Burzum’s Varg Vikernes murder of Dead’s Mayhem bandmate
Euronymous, and the series of church burnings perpetrated by members of the Norwegian
black metal community. Before the carnage, how was this authenticity communicated? In part,
by rejecting death metal’s white sneakers and sweatpants for all-black everything, leather,
chains, spikes—and, most famously, corpsepaint. My essay will examine black metal’s
peculiarly defined—but seriously believed—definition of authenticity, using an existentialist
conception of the self a la Simone de Beauvoir to show how Norwegian black metal musicians
unwittingly queered masculine notions of authenticity by insisting the true self must be
constructed through costuming and makeup.
Marcelo Garzo-Montalvo, “Crushing Colonialism through Black, Indigenous, and (QT)POC Punk
and Heavy Metal”
This listening session will hold a collective space to share our favorite Black, Indigenous, and
(QT)POC punk and heavy metal music. Extreme, underground, and heavy music plays an
important role in our communities – providing an embodied and communal space for liberation,
experimentation, and catharsis amidst a settler colonial and carceral death world. There is
something about loud, dark, abrasive sound that builds communities of resistance and
resonates with our desires for decolonization. Yet, punk and metal aesthetics and communities
continue to be dominated by cis-hetero, white, male identities, imaginaries, and
historiographies. Centering (QT)BIPOC artists and communities allows us to witness how punk
and metal musics have always been important sites of cultural resistance, and have deep roots
in our communities and lineages of struggle. Therefore, this listening session will be a place to
gather these resources and map them together – activating ancestral knowledge systems and
theorizing decolonial futures. Some examples of artists include: Cemican, Alien Weaponry,
Dispossessed, Screaming Toenail, Bad Brains, Death, Los Crudos, Adelitas, I Dont Konform,
Nechochwen, and more. Participants will be asked to share their favorite artists, which will be
added to an ongoing, online playlist, and listened to in real time.
