Australian metal music : identities, scenes, and cultures / edited by Catherine Hoad.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hoad, Catherine, editor.

Series:

Emerald studies in metal music and culture.

Emerald studies in metal music and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rock music--Australia.

Rock music.

Heavy metal (Music)--Australia.

Heavy metal (Music).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (172 pages).

Place of Publication:

Bingley, England : Emerald Publishing, [2019]

Summary:

Defining 'Australian metal' is a challenge for scene members and researchers alike. Australian metal has long been situated in a complex relationship between local and global trends, where the geographic distance between Australia and metal music's seemingly traditional centres in the United States and United Kingdom have meant that metal in Australia has been isolated from international scenes. While numerous metal scenes exist throughout the country, 'Australian metal' itself, as a style, as a sound, and as a signifier, is a term which cannot be easily defined. This book considers the multiple ways in which 'Australianness' has been experienced, imagined, and contested throughout historical periods, within particular subgenres, and across localised metal scenes. In doing so, the collection not only explores what can be meant by Australian metal, but what can be meant by 'Australian' more generally. With chapters from researchers and practitioners across Australia, each chapter maps the distinct ways in which 'Australianness' has been grappled with in the identities, scenes, and cultures of heavy metal in the country. Authors address the question of whether there is anything particularly 'Australian' about Australian metal music, finding that often the 'Australianness' of Australian metal is articulated through wider, mythologised archetypes of national identity. However, this collection also reveals how Australianness can manifest in metal in ways that can challenge stereotypical imaginings of national identity, and assert new modes of being metal 'downungerground'.

Contents:

Prelims

Critical Introduction: what is 'Australian' about Australian heavy metal?

Part I: Australian metal identities: masculine genealogies and trajectories

Chapter 1: Heavy metal kids: a historiographical exploration of australian proto-heavy metal in the 1960s1970s

Chapter 2: 'A blaze in the northern suburbs': Australian extreme metal's larrikinish lineage

Chapter 3: 'We're just normal dudes': hegemonic masculinity, Australian identity, and parkway drive

Part II: Australian metal scenes in the East and West

Chapter 4: ' I think sydney's pretty shit': Melbourne grindcore fans and their others

Chapter 5: Frontierswomen and the Perth scene: female metal musicians on the 'Western front' and the construction of the gothic sublime

Part III: Cultures of resistance in Australian metal

Chapter 6: Creeping Sharia: an extreme response to Islamophobia

Chapter 7: 'This is the funeral of the earth': the 'dead-end' environmental discourses of Australian ecometal

Afterword being metal, being Australian? Reflections and an afterword

Appendix Seminal Australian metal albums: a list by the contributors

Index.

Notes:

Includes index.

Print version record.

ISBN:

9781787691698

1787691691

9781787691674

1787691675