|
|
Busey, S. D. (2018). Parental Advisory-Explicit Content: The Parents Music Resource Center, Conservative Music Censorship, and the Protection of Children. Ann Arbor: University of Nevada.
Abstract: Historians have long overlooked and misunderstood the Parents Music Resource Center, an activist group formed in 1985 to correct perceived excesses in heavy metal music. Scholars have focused their analyses almost exclusively on the First Amendment implications of the group’s actions, largely dismissing the PMRC in the process. This thesis argues that by expanding the historical analysis of the group to include the social and political climate of previous generations and of the 1980s, the self-stated goals of the PMRC, and a musicological discussion of heavy metal and why the group specifically targeted this genre, we can see that the PMRC was in fact an incredibly influential sociopolitical activist group that is representative of the political shift in the United States in the 1980s.
|
|
|
|
Elovaara, M., & Bardine, B. (Eds.). (2017). Connecting metal to culture: unity in disparity. Bristol: Intellect Books.
|
|
|
|
Kahn-Harris, K. (2026). The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us To Live. New York, New York; London: HarperCollins Publisers LLC.
Abstract: << Pioneering metal writer Keith Kahn-Harris presents a moving, visionary exploration of Ozzy Osbourne, and of metal music and culture: the potent legacy Ozzy left us.
What is a ‘good death’?
How about this: After years of terrible health, you gather friends and admirers for one last, glorious party. A couple of weeks later, you slip away, surrounded by your loving family. Then, the world comes to mourn. That is how Birmingham’s favourite son, Ozzy Osbourne, died.
By his death in June 2025 – at an age few believed he’d reach – Ozzy was much-loved, far beyond the metal world. Once a feared, demonic figure to some (and a joke to others), his Back to the Beginning farewell concert at Villa Park raised millions for charity.
In concise, arresting chapters moving from Death to Life via Art, Politics, Sex, Bodies, Voice, Family, Myth and more, Kahn-Harris explores how Ozzy – of all people! – attracted such generosity of spirit. The answer, he finds, is deeply embedded within the story and culture of metal – and has lessons for us all. >>
[Source: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-beautiful-death-of-ozzy-osbourne-how-metal-teaches-us-to-live-keith-kahn-harris]
|
|
|
|
Kloeppel, M. Unveiling Extreme Metal Festival Producers: The Emergence of Narrative Identities (Grace Yan, Ed.). Master's thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Department, Columbia, Missouri.
Abstract: "Extreme Metal is a form of dark tourism and leisure activity whose artistic radicalism and underground scenes invoke intense debates from musicians as well as audiences. Traditional cultural studies have assumed that its disenfranchised and transgressive music expressions are an ideological resistance to increasing homogeneities of industrialized society. As such, considering the nature of festivals as a mechanism where culture is created and transmitted, the operations and promotions of Extreme Metal festivals are inevitably engaged in the wider cultural politics of Extreme Metal. The roles of festival producers thus must be emphasized, who act as powerful agents in engaging artists, developing audiences, arranging programs, and so forth. Indeed, no festivals can be simply described as improvised events – they are carefully programmed, planned, and constructed for audiences to hear and see. With this in mind, this study serves to explore the experiential predicament of these culturally embedded event producers.
In particular, the identities of the festival producers compose the focus of investigation for this research. That is, considering the contested contexts that are at play in shaping the very existence of Extreme Metal, the producers are constantly acting as intermediaries between these contexts. The discursive practice by which they give meaning to their festival production practices, contain profound dissonance between 'what they imagine their selves to be' and 'what they actually are’ as related to their turbulent ‘referential world’ of Extreme Metal festival production.
With this in mind, this study employs the theoretical framework of narrative identity in the examination of the ‘referential world’ by which identities are related. Narrative identity is considered as an approach to understand how people resolve themselves, life events, actions, and other forces in their life. Considering that a self, in narrative, is given meaning through the narrator’s relation of the self to their referential world, analyzing the narrative moments where conflicting contexts are at play provides a sensitization to the struggle of Extreme Metal cultural transgression within festival production. Specifically, it is learned how this tourism is considered ‘dark’. In doing so, three main research questions are asked: 1). How can we understand the festival producers’ identities as negotiated and emerged from the interview narratives? 2). In regards to the festival producers’ identities, what socio-cultural forces in relation to the apparatus of Extreme Metal are involved? 3). How do such findings illuminate the makings of tourism festivals at large?"
(Source: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing)
|
|
|
|
Pack, C. (2018). Hellbound in El Salvador: Heavy Metal as a Philosophy of Life in Central America. Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, Ann Arbor.
Abstract: Heavy Metal in El Salvador has been a driving force of the underground culture since the Civil War in the 1980s. Over time, it has grown into a large movement that encompasses musicians, producers, promoters, media outlets and the international exchange of music, ideas and live shows. As a music based around discontent with society at large, Heavy Metal attempts to question the status quo through an intellectual exploration of taboo subjects and the presentation of controversial live shows. As an international discourse, Heavy Metal speaks to ideas of both socio-political and individual power based around a Philosophy of Life that exalts personal freedoms and personal responsibility to oneself and their society. As a community, it represents a ‘rage’ group, as defined by Peter Sloterdijk, that questions Western epistemologies and the doctrines of Christian Philosophy. This is done in different ways, by different genres, but at the heart is the changing of macro- (international) discourses into micro- (local) discourses that focus on those issues important to the geographic specificity of the region.
In the case of Black Metal, born in Norway, it is interpreted in El Salvador through the similarities between the doctrines of Hitler and those of the most famous dictator in the country’s history – General Maximiliano Hernandez – and then applied, ironically, to the local phenomena of the Salvadoran Street Gangs (MS-13 and 18s) and their desired extermination. It is also done through the re-interpreting of folk metal in the local phenomenon of tribal metal that reinterprets the indigenous through the lens of modern society and heavy metal’s ideas of power. Finally, the Salvadoran metalhead adapts the genre’s vulgarity and dark humor to fuel their own systems of dealing with harsh repression and existing within a society that seems to have no place for them. At the bottom though, much more than a community, Heavy Metal in El Salvador is a source of fraternalismo that utilizes the Philosophy of Life to bind its members together and to provide them a means by which to express their personal freedoms within a society that would happily see them limited.
|
|
|
|
Wilson, S. (2014). Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology. London: John Hunt Publishing.
|
|
