Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge

Keith Kahn-Harris' book on extreme metal started out as a PhD thesis caled "Transgression and Mundanity: The Global Extreme Music Scene," and this tells you a few things about the nature of the book. While I found it a fairly entertaining read, some might say it's overly scholarly and dry. It also largely focuses on themes and the "scene" more than it does the actual music involved.

It starts off with the reasons that KKH thinks that extreme metal is culturally important, and goes on to discuss issues such as gender, race and sexualiry in extreme metal, and to compare/contrast the relative absence of women, gays and ethnic minorities in extreme metal to those in the more mainstream metal scenes. This was some of the more interesting material covered in the book, and most of his ideas seemed fairly sound. He suggest that the above groups tend to exclude themselves, and that "certain backgrounds seem to engender a dislike of extreme metal." He could have written more on outright misogyny and racism, but it's probably all been said before anyway.

I liked the discussion of the lack of "out"homosexuals in the extreme metal scene, despite the abundance of people in black metal who dress a lot like Rob Halford. He quotes another author in saying that a "key element of metal is the misogynist fantasy of a world without women," and cites some of the rather ridiculous (homoerotic?) photoshoots of the band Manowar.

Having spent some time at a few metal messageboards and having run a metal fanzine in the mid-90s, I'm inclined to agree with a lot of this. In fact, I'd say the average metal messageboard user appears to be about 15, male, and still under the impression that women all have cooties. It may also be that the older/wiser/less misogynistic people just have other things to do besides hang around messageboards, but the fact remains that the internet has become a widespread and visible way of discussing music, and the global extreme metal community has changed greatly with the advent of the internet. The views of Kahn-Harris on the subject are thought-provoking, anyway, and the apparent views of the community at large are something that merits thought, even the ones not universally accepted.

Kahn-Harris discusses the ways that music was traded and bought in the early days versus today's file sharing and internet distribution, as well as the impact of things like nu-metal. He suggests that more mainstream bands calling themselves black metal, such as Cradle of Filth, are shunned not only because they suck, but also because they wear bondage gear, have dreadlicks, and feature women on album covers.

An interesting book, but most will probably just skim it here and there. It's not really something to sit down with at night and read cover to cover.

Author:
Keith Kahn-Harris
Publisher:
Berg Publishers

Rating:
Reviewed by:
voodoogirl