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Apter, J. (2021). Bad Boy Boogie: The true story of AC/DC legend Bon Scott. Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Abstract: “Bad Boy Boogie is the first biography to focus on Bon's remarkable gifts as a lyricist, frontman and rascal. In short, the real Bon Scott.” (Source: Allen & Unwin)
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Calandra, N. (2016). Metal health: Measuring depression and anxiety within the heavy metal community. Master's thesis, Long Island University, The Brooklyn Center., Ann Arbor.
Abstract: Heavy metal has a long and controversial history. One of the many things it has been blamed for is causing mental illness among its listeners. However, is the music to be blamed or are there other factors coming into play? Numerous studies have been done on various aspects of heavy metal such as its link to violence, but few have been done on mental health within the community. This paper replicated a French study examining levels of depression and anxiety within the community. Forty three participants, all active metal listeners, completed a survey examining various factors such as employment status and education levels, and completed the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Like the French study, it found that participants had generally low levels of depression and anxiety, but high levels were linked to outside factors. Hopefully, this will help open the floor for more valuable research on the community.
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Odell, G. K. (2019). A Night at the Opera: Performance, Theatricality, and Identity in the Music of Queen. Master's thesis, University of Missouri, Ann Arbor.
Abstract: Many discussions of the rock band Queen (vocalist Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bassist John Deacon) reference their theatricality, yet few analyze what makes Queen’s music and performances theatrical. Through examining Queen’s theatricality from different angles, this thesis shows the different layers of Queen’s performativity and its relationship to identity.
After an introductory chapter that surveys the literature about Queen, the second chapter of the thesis analyzes the theatricality of Queen’s music from a stylistic basis. The chapter begins by addressing Queen’s camp theatricality through their use of music hall, operetta, and musical theatre styles. It then addresses their drama-based theatricality through their use of opera and film music styles. The third chapter analyzes Queen’s performance of gender and sexuality through their use of different genres. It first discusses Queen’s participation in the genre of glam rock, in which they performed a more feminine persona, but were still understood as heterosexual. Then it explores Queen’s disco and funk influenced music and Mercury’s “castro clone” image as simultaneously a more masculine and more homosexual performance. Finally the chapter analyzes the various rock genres Queen used throughout their career in order to perform heterosexual masculinity, including hard rock, stadium rock, and heavy metal.
The fourth chapter focuses primarily on Mercury’s performance of ethnicity and nationality through his music. Taking into account his history as a first-generation Parsi Zanzibarian who immigrated to London, it first looks at his and Queen’s expressions of “Britishness” through the figure of the British pop dandy and their use of the British national anthem. Then it turns to discussing the influence of Mercury’s Persian and African heritage on select songs. Finally, it examines religion as it relates to cultural identity, specifically Mercury’s Zoroastrian heritage and the ways he used the aesthetics of heavy metal to articulate his place within that religion. The fifth chapter concludes the thesis by taking a holistic view of how all of these layers of performativity operated simultaneously, endowing Queen’s music with a deep and complex sense of theatricality.
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Rekedal, J. E. (2015). Warrior Spirit: From Invasion to Fusion Music in the Mapuche Territory of Southern Chile. Ann Arbor: University of California, Riverside.
Abstract: This dissertation chronicles the cultural, musical and performative fronts during two centuries of struggle and negotiation between Mapuche and Chilean societies. The perspective is mainly ethnomusicological, including two years of fieldwork in the Araucanía region, concerning new genres of Mapuche fusion music such as rock and hip-hop. This writing demonstrates how Mapuche expressions and representations accrued various forms of value during Chile's modernization—including colonization, nation building, the emergence of modern social movements, and the implementation of neoliberal policies—and how artists contend with and subvert those values today.
The opening chapters are historical. Following the invasion of Araucanía in the 1880s, Mapuche political activism eventually gained traction by carefully managing a relationship with the Chilean political establishment, while also cultivating a unique approach to political processes that incorporated preexisting rituals. Concurrently, the Mapuche transitioned from adversaries to objects of study, while concepts such as folklore took root in Chilean society. As popular culture took note of Mapuche sounds and symbols toward the mid-twentieth century, non-Mapuche artists and activists codified their progressive ideologies through their embrace of indigeneity, exemplified in art music, and most famously, nueva canción.
Based directly on fieldwork, the second half of the thesis discusses how Mapuche cultural continuity has involved both the recovery of traditions and the incorporation of non-traditional elements. I describe the conversion of a mingako ritual into a festival of music and poetry in the Mapuche comunidad of Saltapura. This transfer from agriculture to expressive culture demonstrates the diminishing value of Mapuche lands, parallel with the increasing value of their expressions, under neoliberal multiculturalism. Meanwhile, Mapuche heavy metal and hip-hop groups such as Pewmayén and Weichafe Newen build their music around ancestral principles of sound, ritual and language, raising the question as to whether Mapuche musical elements thus become ingredients of popular music, or whether popular music becomes Mapuche for incorporating these elements. Through detailed discussions of this music and its broader contexts, this dissertation issues a critique of the culture concept underpinning neoliberal multiculturalism, inherited from the investigations of the Mapuche during the early republican period.
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Roby, D. A. (2021). Crust Punk: An Anarchist Political Epistemology. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Davis, Ann Arbor.
Abstract: The Sex Pistols’ 1976 anthem, “Anarchy in the UK,” memorialized an ongoing relationship between anarchism and punk rock music. Although scholars of punk music have long documented the relationship between leftist or progressive politics in punk music scenes, they have not interrogated the content and sources of anarchist politics, often taking for granted the relationship between anarchism and punk. This dissertation examines the anarchist politics of a particular genre of punk, called “crust punk,” which is a blend of punk and heavy metal. Like most music subcultures, the crust punk scene is much more than musical sounds; it is associated with a particular lifestyle as well. Crust punks’ choices to drop out of society and live in squats or on the streets, I argue, are political. This dissertation combines ethnomusicological methods with a field of study called “political epistemology” from political science that seeks to understand the origins and composition of political ideas. I combine these two approaches to examine crust punk political ideas: where they come from, how they are shared within the scene, and in what ways they can be considered “anarchist.” I conclude that crust punk represents a form of what I theorize as “vernacular anarchism” that arises from precarious forms of existence, is formulated in everyday life experiences, and is given substance through affective and emotional responses to the poetics of crust punk song texts.
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Sabbath, J. (2021). Bienvenidos al Sabbath: Crónicas, Reseñas y Reflexiones en Torno a la Vigencia del Underground, 2001–2021. Sogamoso, Boyacá, Republic of Colombia: Nixx Editores.
Abstract: El libro 'Bienvenidos al Sabbath' ofrece reflexiones en torno a la apreciación de la música metal y la vigencia del underground que contribuyen a la construcción de una teoría del metal. Además, recopila ensayos inéditos junto a una antología de las entrevistas, crónicas y reseñas sobre rock & metal hechas por el autor durante los últimos 20 años.
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Sikes, L. (2017). In the Groove: American Rock Criticism, 1966-1978. Ph.D. thesis, University of Rochester, Ann Arbor.
Abstract: Rock and roll music was a national youth obsession for more than ten years before the first rock critics began writing seriously about the form. Rock was dismissed by adult cultural authorities as empty, degraded, and even dangerous. However, to its fans, rock was an important form of personal expression, a source of group identity, and a mode of political discourse. Rock critics understood its cultural and political power. In their work, they explained its importance to the American public.
In 1966, the first rock critic, Richard Goldstein, began writing about rock and roll in a weekly column in the Village Voice called “Pop Eye.” In it, he asserted that rock and roll was an art that deserved the same recognition and protections afforded to other art forms. By 1967, The New Yorker hired Ellen Willis to write about rock in a regular column called “Rock, Etc.” She brought an intellectual sophistication to the genre that would resound long after her career as a rock critic ended. Later in 1967, Rolling Stone debuted; it would become the most visible and influential source of rock criticism for the next fifty years. Editor Jann Wenner’s tastes and approach would affect the way rock was perceived in his own time and for decades after. Finally, in 1968, Lester Bangs debuted onto the scene, writing artful reviews for publications like Creem and Rolling Stone, explaining the changes that were taking place as rock music splintered into subgenres like punk and heavy metal.
The quality of these rock critics’ thought and the influence of their writing makes rock criticism an important and under-studied branch of Sixties literature. Each of the rock critics addressed in this dissertation explained to the public what rock music meant and why it mattered. By placing rock in its social, political, and cultural context, they demonstrated that it was far from the empty form cultural authorities thought it was. Their work permanently changed perceptions of popular music, proving that it was substantial enough to stand up to the same kind of critical treatment as other art forms.
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Yépez Aguirre, J. R. (2019). La Metaldad y el Habitus y Metalicus en la ciudad de Lima 1994-2014. Pluriversidad, (3), 21.
Abstract: This study has been oriented, to identify the benefits of the qualitative method of the theory built on the different aspects of feeling and thinking of the Metaleros1 in the city of Lima, in order to analyze their impersonal relations with society. In this sense the following objective was proposed: to understand why the social life individualization, the cultural commodification and the music fetishism is reproduced in the feeling and thinking of Lima’s metaleros. An in-depth interview was conducted with 23 young adults and metaleros between aged 14 to 48 years old as a range or limit, which resulted in a non-probabilistic sample. Two conceptual categories were identified: Rockandad and Metaldad, which serve to give interpretation to the problematic raised. In addition, a conceptual theoretical instrument called pyramidal dialectic was elaborated, to give way to the explanation of the research carried out.
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