Australian Metal Music

Identities, Scenes, and Cultures

Catherine Hoad|Rosemary Lucy Hill|Keith Kahn-Harris

Emerald

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9781787691681

28 June 2019

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28 June 2019

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About

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'.

Critical Introduction: What is 'Australian' about Australian Heavy Metal?; Catherine Hoad PART I: Australian Metal Identities: Masculine Genealogies and Trajectories Chapter 1. Heavy Metal Kids: A Historiographical Exploration of Australian Proto-heavy Metal in the 1960s-70s; Paul 'Nazz' Oldham Chapter 2. 'A Blaze in the Northern Suburbs': Australian Extreme Metal's Larrikinish Lineage; Sam Vallen Chapter 3. 'We're Just Normal Dudes': Hegemonic Masculinity, Australian Identity, and Parkway Drive; Samuel Whiting, Paige Klimentou, and Ian Rogers PART II: Australian Metal Scenes in the East and West Chapter 4. 'I Think Sydney's Pretty Shit': Melbourne Grindcore Fans and Their Others; Rosemary Overell Chapter 5. Frontierswomen and the Perth Scene: Female Metal Musicians on the 'Western Front' and the Construction of the Gothic Sublime; Laura Glitsos PART III: Cultures of Resistance in Australian Metal Chapter 6. Creeping Sharia: An Extreme Response to Islamophobia; Can Yalcinkaya and Safdar Ahmed Chapter 7. 'This is the Funeral of the Earth': The 'Dead-end' Environmental Discourses of Australian Ecometal; Ian Collinson Afterword. Being Metal, Being Australian? Reflections and an Afterword; Karl Spracklen Appendix A. Seminal Australian Metal Albums: A List by the Contributors

This volume brings together seven chapters by music, media studies, and other researchers from Australia, the UK, and New Zealand, who consider how national identity impacts the scenes, cultures, and practices of heavy metal in Australia. They explore masculine genealogies and trajectories, particularly the key characteristics of heavy metal in its early days in Australia, the development of extreme metal scenes in the late 1980s, and how trajectories of Australian masculinity emerged in contemporary settings and the subgenre of metalcore; local scenes in Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth, with discussion of female metal musicians and grindcore; and cultures of resistance in Australian metal, including the Muslim blackened death metal band Hazeen and its response to Islamophobia, and the environmental concerns and ecological anxieties of Australian metal.
- Annotation ©2019

Dr Catherine Hoad is Lecturer in Critical Popular Music Studies in the School of Music and Creative Media Production, Massey University Wellington, New Zealand.