Extreme Metal Music And Culture On The Edge 1st Edition Keith Kahn Harris by Keith Kahn Harris 9781845203986, 9781845203993, 1845203984, 1845203992 instant download after payment.

Mention the words ‘heavy metal’ to someone even casually acquainted with contemporary

popular music and you are likely to trigger some strong associations: long hair,

headbanging, screaming vocals and guitars, outrageous behaviour and excess, over the

top machismo, black leather. The semiotics of metal are so well known that they have

an almost iconic position in popular culture. Metal divides people. The music boasts

some of the most devoted music fans across the world and many of its practitioners

are stars. But at the same time metal has always attracted virulent and intense dislike,

even hatred and fear. In the 1980s, metal attracted condemnation from right and left

and was the subject of media- and state-sponsored ‘moral panics’ (Miller 1988;

Richardson 1991).

This iconic representation of metal has become out of step with reality. Although

metal was always more diverse than it was given credit for, there has been a significant

fragmentation of metal since the early 1990s. In the early 1990s, the rise of

grunge, sparked off by the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991), had a profound

effect on metal. It is no hyperbole to state that an entire generation of bands had their

careers ended almost overnight. This was particularly true of ‘pop metal’ bands such

as Poison, but even some of the biggest ‘classic’ metal bands such as Judas Priest and

Iron Maiden suffered a considerable loss of popularity in the 1990s. However,

grunge’s connection with the history of metal was much greater than some of its

protagonists might have liked to admit. This connection has become ever more

evident as subsequent generations of grunge-influenced bands, such as Nickelback,

have produced music that sounds increasingly similar to the classic metal and hard

rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s.