Reddit reviews Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture, Revised Edition

I personally recommend getting your ass to the library or bookstore and getting two very interesting books:

Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music by Robert Walser

Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture by Deena Weinstein

Both are interesting reads and Walser's in particular has a section which memorably compares a particular guitar solo to a Vivaldi violin cadenza... very interesting.

I'm not really much of a death metal person so I can't recommend you anything in the way of bands but the other people who commented sound like they know their shit. :)

Hey mate, doing a PhD on Aussie extreme metal. I'll do a write up for you when I get home :)

Edit: the promised write up.

So, there's actually quite a lot on metal in the academic sphere, but it can be hard to find. It's growing at an exponential rate too, which is exciting! My own area is musicology (with a slight ethnomusicology element) and I've done work on symphonic metal, the original Gothenburg scene and Australian extreme metal. I've published two papers, and done a few posters/conferences so far (I can give some links via PM if you'd like).

Metal studies is very multidisciplinary, with a huge range of content under different subject areas. To start with, I'd encourage you to check out the journal Metal Music Studies which is a completely legit peer-reviewed journal that covers most disciplines. You can also check out conferences like Modern Heavy Metal and there are a few others around. I'd also strongly recommend the book Global Metal Music And Culture as a recent overview of where the field has come from and where it's gotten to.

Other than that there's a variety of books worth looking into. Robert Walser's Running with the Devil and Deena Weinstein's Heavy Metal are the two main starting points. Both are really worth reading, but they're very dated. I'd also strongly recommend both Extreme Metal by Keith Kahn-Harris and Metal, Rock and Jazz by Harris Berger.

My other big recommendations are in musicology areas mostly, which might not be the most helpful to you. I recommend everything Eric Smialek has done; both his theses are great and he combines musicology with a really good perspective on metal culture in general. If you want more, I'm happy to share parts of my literature reviews for my two theses with you.

For your paper, I'd encourage you to do it. My three primers on Aussie metal I did stemmed directly from my PhD and they're be plenty of interest in an article like the one you describe. Check out the first issue of MMS published this year, they had a whole half of the journal about metal from Latin America that might give you some ideas. Don't worry about ethnomusicology methods, there are barely any ethnomusicologists in metal studies, it's nowhere near the norm for the field. There's no one disciplinary style that's expected because there's such a wide range of disciplines in the field. There's also always the option of publishing metal-focused work in subject-specific journals (I can link you a few music ones if you'd like). More than happy to talk more in detail about this.

Finally, I'd like to offer a little word of advice: be careful of assuming that there's not much that's reputable or 'gets' metal. There is a lot of mediocre stuff out there on metal that unfortunately often gets publicised (e.g. Sam Dunn, Until the Light Takes Us etc.) but don't let that colour your view of an entire field. Equally, don't assume that because a writer's cultural experience of metal differs from yours and that of your main communities (e.g. reddit, your local scene etc.) that it's wrong. I had to really get over this, as I found a lot of writing on metal didn't match my experience but I've decided to respond by a) acknowledging that my experience might not match theirs and b) writing a lot about my experience! I'm particularly interested in genre, especially in terms of making some clear, musical( or even musicological) definitons for genres and working out exactly how and why genres like metalcore and hard rock 'don't belong' according to many fans. A bit of a tanget, but something talking about imo.

I really hope that's helpful. Please do ask if you have any questions, I love talking about metal academia (and miss AveLucifer and chatting with him about some of this!) and I'm really keen to help others get into it.

Haven't read it yet, but I previously came across Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture.