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LEISURE STUDIES IN A GLOBAL ERA

Heavy Metal Music,

Texts, and Nationhood
(Re)sounding Whiteness

Catherine Hoad
 Leisure Studies in a Global Era

Series Editors
Karl Spracklen, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK
Karen Fox, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
In this book series, we defend leisure as a meaningful, theoretical, framing
concept; and critical studies of leisure as a worthwhile intellectual and
pedagogical activity. This is what makes this book series distinctive: we
want to enhance the discipline of leisure studies and open it up to a
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phies and other social sciences and humanities to open up to engaging
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about identity, postmodernity and globalisation in contemporary soci-
eties across the world. The series combines the search for local, qualita-
tively rich accounts of everyday leisure with the international reach of
debates in politics, leisure and social and cultural theory. In doing this,
we will show that critical studies of leisure can and should continue to
play a central role in understanding society. The scope will be global,
striving to be truly international and truly diverse in the range of authors
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Editorial Board
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Yoshitaka Mori, Associate Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan
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sity of Georgia, USA
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Taiwan
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University, The Netherlands
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ical School, Chicago, USA
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Africa

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 Catherine Hoad

Heavy Metal Music,

Texts,
and Nationhood
(Re)sounding Whiteness
Catherine Hoad
College of Creative Arts
Massey University
Wellington, New Zealand

Leisure Studies in a Global Era

ISBN 978-3-030-67618-6 ISBN 978-3-030-67619-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67619-3

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 Acknowledgements

This book came together in what has probably been the strangest year of
my life. When I returned home to Australia for Christmas in late 2019,
the fires raging through my home state seemed all-encompassing; their
impact too overwhelming to fathom. Now, in September of 2020, the
fires seem a distant memory. Back in Aotearoa, life has been brought to a
standstill by the COVID-19 pandemic in many ways, but global politics
seems to surge on in increasingly troubling forms. Attempting to write a
book under these conditions has been interesting, to say the least.
This research has its roots in my Ph.D. studies, which I completed in
2016. Metal has changed and developed in myriad ways in the period
since I first became interested in how these themes of nationalism, colo-
niality and Whiteness manifest in metal’s texts, practices and discourses.
Nevertheless, scenes worldwide continue to offer complex and engaging
sites for analysis, which has expanded the bounds of my original doctoral
research. I want to thank Rosemary Overell and Pauwke Berkers for their
encouragement to pursue this work beyond my Ph.D. I also wish to
extend my deep gratitude to Dr. Ian Collinson, who was my supervisor
in this time, and who has continued to be a great support and friend in
the years since I completed my studies.

v
vi Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to my colleagues and friends at Massey

University, particularly Bridget and Birgit, who have been incred-
ibly supportive over this book-writing adventure, and also wonderfully
patient with me as I waded through the depths of editing misery. I am
hugely thankful to the wonderful editorial team at Palgrave for their
understanding and guidance throughout this process, particularly Balaji
and Sharla, and a special mention to Karl Spracklen, who, like another
bearded theorist named Karl, has been an academic hero of mine since I
first discovered his work.
Finally, I want to thank my mum, dad and brother, from whom I’ve
been separated by virtue of closed borders for the better part of a year.
Thank you for playing Sabbath and Dio on repeat during my formative
years; for never batting an eyelid when I said I wanted to do a Ph.D. in
metal; and for always being there for me. I love you and hope that by the
time this is published, I can deliver a copy to you in person.

September 2020 Catherine Hoad

 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 17
3 Norwegian Black Metal and Viking Metal 59
4 Afrikaans Metal in Post-Apartheid South Africa 109
5 Normophilia and Banal Nationalism in Australian
Extreme Metal 151
6 (Re)sounding, (re)sealing: Translocal Terrains
of Whiteness across Norway, South Africa
and Australia 197
7 Conclusion 245

Index 257

vii
 1
Introduction

All you white kids out there, let me tell you something that no other
motherfucking band, no other white band, in the world has any guts to
say. I’m just saying right now, when you wake up in the motherfucking
morning, and you look at yourself in the goddamn mirror, hey, have all
the fucking pride in your heart man, have all the fucking pride in the
world man. Because we are the great people and hey, you know what,
maybe, just maybe, tonight is a white thing.
—Philip H. Anselmo, Montreal, March 4th 1995.

This lengthy speech by Pantera’s then-frontman Phil Anselmo occurred

during a break in their set on the Canadian leg of the band’s ‘Far Beyond
Touring’ world tour. Pantera were not a racist band, Anselmo declared,
but he had a ‘problem’ with ‘black culture’, which he believed advo-
cated the killing of white people. On face value, this drunken tirade by
Anselmo—one for which he later apologised, and repeatedly attempted
to distance himself from—was an early example in a longer line of prob-
lematic, if naïve, racial rhetoric from the frontman of one of metal’s
biggest acts.1 Anselmo and Pantera had capitalised upon their own

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Hoad, Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and Nationhood,
Leisure Studies in a Global Era,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67619-3_1
2 C. Hoad

self-crafted image as cowboys from hell, ‘good ol’ Southern boys’ who
espoused heritage, not hate; whose lead guitarist shredded on a custom-
designed guitar bearing the Confederate flag, and whose merchandise
had long born this symbol.2 This five minute monologue, punctuated
throughout by loud cheering from the crowd, was perhaps more notable
for its tacit assumptions than Anselmo’s outright declarations that white
men were victims of discrimination. It was Anselmo’s direct categori-
sation of Pantera as a ‘white band’, his confidence in addressing his
audience as a uniformly white ‘we’. Most significant of all, it was the
statement that tonight, a heavy metal concert in one of the biggest cities
in North America, was ‘a white thing’.
Anselmo’s now 25-year-old characterisation of metal as a ‘white thing’
remains a source of deep interest to me, as it taps in to a broader and
immeasurably complex problem of how whiteness has been discussed
and understood within heavy metal music, both as a site of academic
inquiry and force of cultural significance. The apparent demographic
abundance of young white men within metal is a common feature
of scholarly and popular appraisals of the genre, but the political and
cultural significance of such whiteness has gone largely uninterrogated.
Furthermore, the global circulation of heavy metal has meant that claims
as to the large-scale whiteness of metal’s audience need revaluation, if not
total deconstruction. Metal has nonetheless remained a white-dominated
discourse, and white hegemony is deeply entrenched in the dominant
ways of thinking about and representing heavy metal. Similarly, that
Anselmo’s Montreal speech is still referenced and the video shared by
mainstream metal press such as Loudwire, Blabbermouth and Metal
Hammer more than two decades on, and continues to invoke conver-
sation and debate amongst scene members, suggests a great deal about
the complicity of texts in sustaining such discourses. Following this, in
this book I ask how, when metal bands and fans are present in every
continent, has metal maintained a reputation as a ‘white’ genre? More-
over, how has white metal masculinity been affixed as the ‘norm’, when
women and persons of colour constitute visible and vital presences within
scenes? Metal is a global genre, but its whiteness is continually imbued
with an instrumental significance.
 1 Introduction 3

The goal of this book is twofold: to negotiate scholarly ways of

addressing representations of whiteness in metal that move beyond
discussions of demographics, virtuosity and spectacular racism, and to
critically engage with texts as key carriers of instrumental white hege-
mony within metal scenes. The title here is thus a play on the duality
of (re)sounding: whiteness resounds in metal’s dominant histories, yet
the genre itself constantly renegotiates the musicocultural sounds of such
whiteness, and attempts at re-sounding accordingly. The book argues
that the whiteness and white heteromasculinity of heavy metal emerges
across disparate locales as an expression of a series of distinct, nationally-
situated projects. Such projects are realised, in my analysis, through the
procession of texts which are produced within and shape the histories
of specific heavy metal scenes. Norman Fairclough (1992) pointed out
that texts serve an ideological purpose of naming or wording the social
and natural world, shaping them for particular purposes and in the inter-
ests of certain privileged groups (185–190). As a form of social practice,
the construction and transmission of knowledge through texts is tied
to specific historical and sociocultural contexts, and, as Yongbing Liu
has argued, texts are a core means by which existing social relations are
produced or contested, and different interests are served (Liu, 2008: 59).
In this way, this book draws on a longer tradition in critical
theory which argues that texts are intrinsically tied to the construction
and maintenance of national identity (Anderson, 1991; Hall, 1997).
However, I also draw this relationship into focus through its intersec-
tions with whiteness, where texts are similarly essential to the imagining
and representation of whiteness as a social, cultural and political cate-
gory (Burton, 2009). The objective of my work here is thus to unveil
the (in)visibility of whiteness within heavy metal scenes, and indicate
how such whitenesses are deployed within particular countries, as both
explicit political violence and instrumental hegemony. In particular, I
look to examples from Norway, South Africa and Australia to consider
the ways in which whiteness has emerged and been both negotiated and
contested in the textual practices of specific metallic communities in
these nations.
Through examining texts emergent from these distinct metal scenes,
this book explores three key forms of nationalism—Norway’s monstrous
4 C. Hoad

nationalism, South Africa’s resistant nationalism and Australia’s banal

nationalism—through which processions of whiteness are realised and
articulated. These three forms are not demonstrative or exhaustive of
the metallic discourses in these countries, but they serve as pertinent
examples of the ways in which national, gendered and ethnicised poli-
tics become entangled within scenes, and reproduced and reconstructed
in and through texts. Such constellations of whiteness and nationhood
have enabled both tacit and explicit constructions of exclusionary white-
ness to foster a sense of community formed through collective memory
and territory. These scenes, as I explore, are demonstrative of the ways
in which white inflections inform the texts and practices of heavy metal
scenes, and the specifically local whitenesses manifest within them.
This book is concerned with interrogating the means through which
whiteness gains expression in distinct cultural contexts, the national
specificity with which whiteness is valorised in certain segments of metal
scenes, and how disparate national identities are both tacitly and explic-
itly tied to white heteromasculine identity. In doing so, I emphasise
from the outset that I do not conceive of heavy metal, nor whiteness, as
inherently racist.3 Such an immediate reactionary definition ignores the
political and structural complexities of whiteness in its most tacit mani-
festations. I also do not suggest that scene members in Norway, South
Africa and Australia ought to conceive of their generic and cultural histo-
ries and present as overtly (or even necessarily covertly) racist. Nor does
this research emerge as a call to deny white people, including the bands
and individuals mentioned throughout, an identity either in metal, or at
large. White people are a material reality—however, it is the way they are
thought of as being white that makes the difference (Blaagaard, 2006: 4).
The ways in which metal is ‘thought of as being white’, in both schol-
arly research and popular texts, is hence core to my analysis. In this way
I am indebted to the ongoing interventions provided by Karl Spracklen
(2020), who has done the vital groundwork of showing how metal music
might be seen as a leisure space that resist the norms and values of the
mainstream; but might also serve to re-affirm and construct those norms
and values.
 1 Introduction 5

The objective here is not to refuse white people the right to group
identification and belonging, or to demand that white people eradi-
cate all identity and hereditary connections (Outlaw, 2004: 167–168),
but instead to observe how whiteness and its embedded ideologies have
operated as central structuring frameworks for metal culture, even as the
genre continues to expand. The normalisation, construction and perfor-
mance of narrow imaginings of whiteness, masculinity and nationhood
within heavy metal texts can have profound, pervasive and system-
atic oppressive consequences for non-white people, women and Queer
communities. This research also responds to a long-standing trend
in Metal Music Studies wherein whiteness has been perceived of as
largely unified or hegemonic. The quest in pointing to the fragmen-
tation and multiplicity of whitenesses across three different countries
is to deconstruct this notion of uniformity, and call into question the
strategic political position that emerges in treating whiteness as a uniform
category.

Metal and Critical Whiteness Studies

Tracking the linked dimensions of whiteness that emerge within metal
scenes, texts and scholarship necessitates, in the first instance, a crit-
ical foregrounding of ‘whiteness’ itself. I draw from previous schol-
arly work which situates whiteness as a particular structural location;
as a ‘standpoint’ from which white people look at themselves, at
others and at society; and a set of cultural practices that are usually
unmarked and unnamed (Frankenberg, 1993: 1). Whiteness furthermore
emerges as a multiplicity of identities that are historically-grounded, class
specific, politically manipulated and gendered social locations (Twine &
Gallagher, 2008: 6). Analyses of whiteness must address cultural sites
such as music scenes as ‘popular spaces where collective white identities
are produced and white identities normalised’ (Twine & Gallagher, 2008:
15). Metal Music Studies must reveal not only whiteness, but whitenesses
as they emerge through specific geographic, demographic, cultural and
political discourses.
6 C. Hoad

Much as this book is an interrogation of how metal and white-

ness function in different national contexts, it also serves as a study
of how Metal Music Studies, as an academic field, has been—perhaps
unwittingly—complicit in the continued imagining of metal’s ostensibly
‘inherent’ whiteness. Where Metal Music Studies has gained traction as
an interdisciplinary subject field committed to research and developing
theory surrounding heavy metal music, scenes, communities, cultures
and practices, the field has until recently lacked sustained critiques of
metal’s reputation as a ‘white musical genre’ (Bayer, 2009: 185). More-
over, Metal Music Studies itself is of central importance to understanding
the role of music cultures across the globe. There are over one hundred
thousand heavy metal bands worldwide,4 and fans themselves number
in the millions. Metal fans are the most loyal listeners worldwide (van
Buskirk, 2015) and the centrality of metal to daily cultural life for indi-
viduals and communities across hundreds of nations indicates that it
is a genre of substantial cultural significance and creative force. Metal
has been conspicuous in its ability to mobilise sentiments of national
and ethnic identity. It is thus vital for Metal Music Studies to address
the implications of its own complicity in constructing and representing
heavy metal as a white-dominated, masculine space.
Heavy metal is a discourse dominated by whiteness, and white hege-
mony has long been deeply entrenched in the dominant ways of
representing metal music, cultures and practices. Metal is a site that
both enables a tradition of exclusion and nostalgic (re)production of
purity, yet also defines its whiteness through dominant images of white
musicians, industry workers and racialised marketing tools (Spracklen,
2013a). Such definitions and representations are thus the sites through
which ‘collective white identities are produced and white identities
normalised’, to look again to Twine and Gallagher (2008: 15). Metal’s
whiteness has been affixed with normative value, and hence its mech-
anisms are rendered invisible. The task I want to mount in this book
is then to dismantle the representational hegemony of whiteness within
metal scenes, and map how such textual processions of whiteness are
deployed with national specificity.
This research owes a debt to the critical work which has preceded and
heavily influenced it. I speak particularly of Robert Walser’s declaration
 1 Introduction 7

that the generic cohesion of heavy metal depends upon the ‘desire of
young white male performers and fans to hear and believe in certain
stories about the nature of masculinity’ (1993: 110), and Karl Spracklen’s
mapping of how metal constructs a hegemonic whiteness (2010, 2013a,
2013b, 2015, 2020) that is sustained along classed, raced and gendered
lines which cater to a national imaginary, and maintains an imagined
community (Lucas et al., 2011; Spracklen et al., 2014). Mapping how
metal’s texts offer a canon through which fans are able to ‘hear and
believe’ these stories, and their subsequent role in maintaining an imag-
ined community, is core to the work I want to enact here. Furthermore,
mapping how the nature of these textual dynamics shift across contexts
and national histories is core to this work, where the instrumental white-
ness of heavy metal scenes across disparate locales is yet to be adequately
critiqued or acknowledged in the wider field.
Previous research into the political and cultural significance of white-
ness in popular music has largely focused on the cultural politics of punk
(e.g. Duncombe & Tremblay, 2011), pop (Stras, 2010) and rock (Frith,
[1978] 1987). The understandings of the politics of whiteness in popular
music that have emerged from this research situate whiteness as a cultural
norm against which the musics and musical performances of ‘Others’
have been evaluated. Recent understandings of the functions of white-
ness in leisure have been able to tease out the conscious and unconscious
power structures embedded within both music scenes, industries, jour-
nalism and research itself (Schaap, 2015, 2019; Spracklen, 2013a). While
moves have been made to conceive of music scenes as sites of instru-
mental whiteness (Spracklen, 2013a: 63) where white discourses function
in both overt and tacit ways, these understandings have only recently
started to emerge in studies of metal. Much metal literature positions
heavy metal as a ‘white genre’, though current understandings overlook
the political and cultural implications of this categorisation, and obscure
the structuring mechanisms of white hegemony. Where the sub-field of
‘Global’ Metal Studies has provided a necessary disruption to orthodox
representations of metal audiences as universally white, such approaches
nevertheless continue to saturate whiteness in normative value.
There remains a need to draw attention to the political significance
of metal’s whiteness, and demonstrate its national manifestations. Doing
8 C. Hoad

so necessitates moving metallic whiteness beyond discussions of white-

ness as purely demographic, or whiteness as a normative site against
which ‘global’ metal can be evaluated. Tracking the textual narrations
and formations of white patriarchal nationhood as they are expressed
in disparate metal contexts can therefore offer a new line of enquiry to
Metal Music Studies, and contribute to the uses of textual analysis as
a methodological tool within Whiteness Studies. Doing so provides an
alternate perspective to claims that the cultural significance of metal’s
whiteness is ‘less an affirmation of whiteness than it is an absence—an
obtrusive absence—of blacks’ (Weinstein, 2000: 111), and that metal’s
whiteness is overstated or that studies have centred ‘primarily [on]
whiteness’ (Phillipov, 2012: 65).
This book engages with the following questions as a means of combat-
ting these challenges. I ask how textual representations of whiteness
create a ‘normal’ scenic centre which correlates heavy metal with white,
Western, heteromasculinity. Moreover, I ask how his normative whiteness
naturalises the dominance of young white men within representations of
heavy metal, to the exclusion and marginalisation of Others, with specific
national implications. These questions also outline broader possibilities
for the field of Metal Music Studies. How do we speak about whiteness
in metal in ways that move beyond current discussions of demographics,
virtuosity and explicit racism? How can research undertaken in Metal
Music Studies reveal and renegotiate hidden mechanisms of whiteness,
and point to its multiplicity and meanings across global metal scenes,
practices and cultures?

Objectives and Methodology

Much of this research emerged from with my own personal engage-
ment with and experiences of metal. I am situated within this research
in my capacity as a longtime metal fan and regular participant in
Australia’s thrash, grindcore and death metal scenes, and later in those
of Aotearoa/New Zealand; I am also a fan of many of the bands and
works discussed here. In acknowledging my position within both the
metal scene and academia, while I have often experienced Othering by
 1 Introduction 9

virtue of being a metal fan who is also a woman within various contexts,
my whiteness has conferred upon me certain forms of capital. This
project at large has necessitated my own awareness of my privilege as
a white woman working within an academic environment, and further-
more, forced my own critical reckoning with how I, as a fan, navigate
material and discourses within metal which may emerge as contrary to
my own anti-racist politics. My goal is not to further entrench the posi-
tion of white heterosexual masculinity within metal by devoting another
academic book to this topic, but rather precisely to destabilise this posi-
tion by pointing to the contextually-specific mechanisms and discourses
that enable its centrality across seemingly disparate locations.
Textual analysis is a key method within this research, wherein texts
generated by heavy metal scenes—individual songs, lyrics, album art and
promotional material—provide tangible artefacts for mapping symbolic
discourses of power, nationhood and their narration and representation.
I am also interested in texts as they exist in the discourses and oral tradi-
tions produced and reproduced by fans. Such material can seemingly join
text with reception, and potentially blur the traditionally parasocial rela-
tions between producers, performers and audiences. Fans consume texts,
but they also generate their own which contribute to a wider reposi-
tory of discourses, symbols and meanings; fans both shape and generate
narratives and practices of heavy metal. Fan texts also offer sources of
meaning which operate beyond the institutional frameworks of ‘official’
texts—commercially released albums, promotional material, autobiogra-
phies and so on—a DIY context which further reveals the possibilities
and applications of textual analysis as a tool for engaging with the inter-
pretation of social and cultural meaning. In utilising textual and critical
discourse analysis, I am interested in not only the materiality of texts, as
tangible scenic products of heavy metal, but also how discourse regulates
sentiments of scenic identity and belonging. Analysis of live concerts, fan
magazines, underground zines, interviews, podcasts and online discus-
sion spaces such as forums and social media sites—as Kahn-Harris has
observed, ‘one can be an active member of the scene from one’s own
home’ (2007: 74)—further reveals how texts are centrally implicated in
in the dominant ways of speaking about and conceiving of the identity
of national scenes, and the wider national contexts they exist within.
10 C. Hoad

Structure of the Book

This book consists of five chapters. The first examines the history of
metal’s discursive formations in academic and popular texts, exploring
the growth of Metal Music Studies as a consolidated field, and its repre-
sentations and legacies. In Chapter 3, I undertake a critical analysis of
how whiteness has been represented and performed within Norwegian
black and Viking metal scenes, mapping how this is embedded within
the wider national imperative of maintaining ‘Norwegianness’, and the
tensions this entails. Chapter 4 explores the role of heavy metal within
the texts of the ‘cultural heritage industry’ of post-Apartheid South
Africa, with a specific focus on the Afrikaans heavy metal scene as a
response to the ‘loss’ of Afrikaner identity. Chapter 5, the final national
case study, investigates the ways in which the mutually supportive oper-
ations of masculinity and whiteness have shored up Australian identity
within the spaces of Australia’s extreme (thrash, black and death) metal
scenes.
Chapters 6 and 7 offers a critical comparison and synthesis of the
three previous national case studies, and a reflection upon and further
critique of the ways in which metal can be understood within the theo-
retical frameworks of nationalism and Whiteness studies. In this chapter,
I question how metal’s mythologised rhetoric of rebellion may be crit-
ically engaged in analysing how nationalist and racialised orthodoxies
can be reinforced through metal texts. I nevertheless also consider how
metal scenes themselves have taken critical tools beyond the academy. By
engaging with the critical anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic
work that metal scenes perform, I consider how making visible the frag-
mentary nature of whiteness in heavy metal can act as a mechanism
within this anti-racist project. In this way, I hope that expanding the
theoretical tools of Metal Music Studies can assist in destabilising the
greater systemic and structural inequalities which permeate and circle
through scenes.
 1 Introduction 11

Conclusion
Through the following discussions of textual processions of whiteness
in metal scenes across Norway, South Africa and Australia, this books
makes a case for Metal Music Studies to make metallic whiteness not
only more visible, but more aware of its representations, mediations
and constructions. In destabilising the normative position of white
masculinity within metal texts and practices, and pointing to its realisa-
tions across seemingly disparate geographical locations, metal scholarship
may cast the same academic gaze inwards and make visible the mech-
anisms of whitenesses as they manifest in heavy metal scenes, cultures
and practices, and the way academics themselves document and theo-
rise metal. Ultimately the objective of this book is not to renounce
or abolish whitenesses in metal, but rather to consider how white-
nesses have emerged as dominant markers around which identities are
formed and maintained, often in exclusory formations. Metal has been
a rich site of identity work for scene members and communities inter-
sected across multiple axes. Drawing into focus the textually-mediated
discourses which have structured metal’s dominant images and practices
can then enable us to map where metal has and continues to grow, as the
genre enters its seventh decade.

Notes
1. Further to these remarks made in 1995, critics of Anselmo also point to
anti-Semetic and Islamophobic lyrics in the 2003 track ‘Stealing a Page or
Two from Armed and Radical Pagans’ by his side project Superjoint Ritual
(c.f. Rosenberg, 2016) and a 2016 incident in which a video filmed by
a fan and posted to YouTube showed Anselmo offering a Nazi salute and
shouting white pride slogans (Brannigan, 2016). In reponse to the latter,
Anselmo commented on the video via his label Housecore Records, claiming
the salute was an ‘inside joke’ (Chris/Youtube, 2016). While Anselmo has
long denied charges of racism, including a 2019 interview with Kerrang! In
which he claimed that while he was ‘reckless and …absurd on purpose’,
he did not ‘have a racist bone in [his] body’ (Law, 2019), these incidents
12 C. Hoad

resulted in New Zealand venues cancelling Anselmo’s booked shows in 2019

following the Christchurch massacre (Reid, 2019).
2. In 2015, Anselmo addressed his own changing relationship to the Confed-
erate flag, stating ‘These days, I wouldn’t want anything to fucking do
with it because truthfully…I wouldn’t…The way I feel and the group of
people I’ve had to work with my whole life, you see a Confederate flag
out there that says ‘Heritage, not hate.’ I’m not so sure I’m buying into
that’ (Grow, 2015). While Anselmo displayed a changed attitude toward
the flag, and much of this merchandise was pulled by Pantera’s webstore, his
former bandmate Vinny Paul referred to it as a ‘knee jerk reaction’ (Sticks
for Stones, 2015).
3. Responses to actions by Phil Anselmo in 2016, wherein he appeared to offer
a white pride salute during a show (Hollywood, January 2, 2016), indicate
that anti-racism is a sentiment strongly held among many scene members,
and that racism and white pride remain a central site of conflict within
metal scenes (c.f. Rosenberg, 2016).
4. Wallach et al. note that in mid-2007 the online Encyclopaedia Metallum
contained listings for 47,626 metal bands from 129 countries (2011: 5)—as
of September 2020, it lists 139,135 bands from 151 countries.

References
Anselmo, P. H. (1995, March 4). Pantera. Far Beyond Touring, Auditorium de
Verdun, Montreal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxQk3DC3gL0.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. Verso.
Bayer, G. (2009). Rocking the nation: One global audience, one flag? In G.
Bayer (Ed.), Heavy metal music in Britain (pp. 181–194). Ashgate.
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 1 Introduction 13

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4vttarwy1v5son04cihtiry3dfhn4kco.
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 1 Introduction 15

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 2
Mapping Representation in Metal Music
Studies

Introduction
Scholarly and popular accounts of heavy metal have long looked to texts
produced within scenes as a medium for both the analysis and docu-
mentation of practices, identities and cultures, across myriad contexts.
As metal has developed worldwide as both a musical style and culture,
discussions, representations and analyses of the genre have grown and
diversified. Critical engagements with heavy metal have progressed from
their earliest days of moral panics and disdainful condemnations of its
musical and social worth into an academic field—Metal Music Studies—
that engages with the complex and multifaceted ways in which heavy
metal music, scenes and cultures are experienced globally. However, just
as academic and popular texts alike have moved away from negative and
often limited depictions of heavy metal music and its fans, particularly
in tracking its growth beyond Anglo-American contexts, much of metal’s
textual canon has continued to depict of the traditional ‘centre’ of heavy
metal as the province of young white men.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Hoad, Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and Nationhood,
Leisure Studies in a Global Era,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67619-3_2
18 C. Hoad

This chapter responds to the issues proposed in the introduction by

analysing how white hegemony is entrenched in the dominant ways of
thinking about metal music, cultures and practices. In picking up my
immediate concern with texts as carriers of this hegemony, popular and
scholarly texts about heavy metal have, somewhat paradoxically, been
key enablers in the conception of a ‘normal’ scenic centre that correlates
heavy metal with white, Western, heteromasculinity. These representa-
tions have naturalised the dominance of young white men within metal,
to the exclusion and marginalisation of Others. Furthermore, such texts
enter into a complex network of discourses of nationhood, belonging and
exclusivity when they are taken up within specific national formations
and representations. The question of ‘representation’ is hence central to
this chapter, which engages Metal Music Studies as a field: as Robert
Walser (2011: 333) has noted, ‘what is at stake, as always, is not just the
actual nature of a reality that is to be represented, but the context of the
representing, its purpose’.
Interrogating the contexts and purposes of metal’s textual representa-
tions is core to understanding the ways in which exclusory imaginings of
metal scenes are tied to and represented within the wider socio-cultural
politics of ethnonational belonging. Popular texts have played a crucial
role in heavy metal’s cultural image both historically (c.f. Brown, 2015:
263) and contemporaneously, where understandings of metal music and
its fans have been largely mediated through both fictional and ‘factual’
representations. Such representations have contributed to definitions
of metal scenes, influencing the ‘myths’ associated with such scenes
and continually restructuring their meanings for audiences (Hassan,
2010: 246). Developments in Metal Music Studies have been crucial
to informing both public sentiment about metal and scene members’
understandings of their ‘own’ scenes, yet the reception and legacies of
the field are enmeshed within a series of dominant paradigms which can
reinforce the marginality felt at the level of individual scenic experiences.
Scholarship about heavy metal has, for a large portion of its history,
created and constituted the default heavy metal scene member as white,
heterosexual and male. In creating this default position, metal schol-
arship has often reinscribed the same exclusionary logics of scenic
engagement that has marginalised and exscribed women and non-white
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 19

Others from the spatial and cultural sites of heavy metal. This trend has
been buttressed by the dominant modes of mapping identity—sexual,
gendered, raced and classed—within heavy metal. Where scholarship
has repeatedly noted that metal is a masculinised genre, dominated
by masculinist codes of representation and legitimisation, literature has
largely only mapped spectacular displays of hypermasculinity and as such
has often allowed conventional masculine performativity to uncritiqued.
Furthermore, where heavy metal scholarship does map whiteness, it may
do so largely in ways that speak to demographics or virtuosity, without
offering a critique of its ideological foundations or political significance.
This chapter examines how Metal Music Studies, as an academic
field, has negotiated, resisted and reflected the wider structural condi-
tions of white hegemony. If we are to follow Barthes’ insistence that
that theory is a discursive practice, and the discursive practice of theory
is one that questions and challenges received ideas and orthodoxy that
dominate any language (1984), then it remains necessary to consider
how this approach this approach can be extended to assumptions held
by researchers or embedded within the research process itself (Stern,
1989). Metal Music Studies, which has its earliest incarnations in the
1980s, has diversified substantially in its disciplines, methods and areas of
focus, as it has developed. I am nonetheless interested in how whiteness
and white masculinity have been discussed in the field of Metal Music
Studies, in ways that have situated such categories as normative posi-
tions. I begin by addressing the foundational literature within Critical
Whiteness Studies; how its concerns are addressed by wider approaches
to leisure spaces; and how texts and textual analysis are situated within
this scope. In looking towards the applications of these methods to Metal
Music Studies, I critique four broad manifestations of metallic whiteness
that emerge within the academic literature: whiteness as an absence of
blackness; whiteness as Western working-class identity; whiteness as a
site of spectacular racism; and whiteness as creative virtuosity.
A further point of interest lies in how, in attempting to offer an
alternative to the staid orthodoxy of white hegemony, the literature of
‘global metal’ may also continue to entrench whiteness as the default
subject position within heavy metal cultures. The ‘Othering’ rhetoric
20 C. Hoad

emergent from ‘global metal’ as a model may be remediated with anal-

yses that address the structural hegemony of whiteness. The scenic logics
of heavy metal and metal scholarship have in many ways allowed for the
proliferation of an insider/outsider binary realised through micro- and
macro-level studies. Such research has often exoticised and marginalised
women and people of colour within heavy metal cultures through
taxonomies of difference, and the implementation of a centre/periphery
model represented large-scale through the discourse of ‘global metal’.
Doing so enables a revision of whiteness as not simply a demographic
category, but as an element in complex cultural practices.

Whiteness, Texts and Leisure

Textual analysis—which I define here as a methodological approach to
research which examines the content, structure, functions and meanings
generated by a text and its interrelated connections with an audience—
has a significant history within both Whiteness Studies and Popular
Music Studies, and is a methodology which continues to yield impor-
tant insights into the symbols and discourses which shape and constitute
the various fields of leisure, popular music performance, materials and
cultures. A ‘text’, in this sense, is understood as any object which can be
‘read’—i.e. analysed, interpreted and capable of transmitting or gener-
ating meaning. Traditionally, as Paul Ricoeur has noted, the text has been
taken to be literary—that is, written (1981). However, as he contends,
understanding of texts as ‘any discourse fixed by writing’ (1981) are inad-
equate in approaching the plurality and diversity of texts. This fixity of
writing has also been critiqued by scholars engaging with oral traditions
as sites of meaning and narrative practice, particularly for Indigenous
peoples and colonised populations (c.f. Hamilton, 1987; Klapproth,
2009). Expanding textual analysis into leisure sites such as music scenes
thus means calling into focus what can be heard, performed and expe-
rienced, and therein such texts’ characteristics and/or structure, or the
signs that convey meaning and allow interpretation for both the creator
and ‘reader’ alike.
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 21

Secondary to this question of where or what the text ‘is’ has been
the quandary of why texts matter, and indeed why textual analysis is
a valuable method for engaging with leisure spaces. In mapping the
uses and importance of textual analysis methods, Norman Fairclough’s
1995 account gives a definitive overview of the continued significance of
text-based research. Fairclough’s typification—theoretical, methodolog-
ical, historical and political—continues to provide a useful schema in
approaching not only the applications of the method, but also the value
of texts themselves to social and cultural formations. The influence of
this approach is summed up thus by Urpo Kovala:

The theoretical reason is that the social structures which are the focus of
attention of many social scientists, and texts, in turn, constitute one very
important form of social action. Further, as language is widely misin-
terpreted as transparent, the precise mechanisms and modalities of the
social and ideological work that language does in producing, reproducing
or transforming social structures, relations and identities, is routinely
overlooked. The methodological reason is that texts constitute a major
source of evidence for grounding claims about social structures, relations
and processes. The historical reason for the importance of textual anal-
ysis is that texts are sensitive barometers of social processes, movement
and diversity, and textual analysis can provide particularly good indica-
tors of social change. Finally, the political reason relates to social science
with critical objectives especially. Namely, it is increasingly through texts
(visual texts included) that social control and social domination are exer-
cised. Textual analysis can therefore be a political resource as well. (Kovala,
2002: 4)

I quote Kovala at length here precisely because this schematic demon-

strates the value of the ‘text’ to social and cultural phenomena, and their
implications, modalities and mechanisms therein. Such an approach is
immediately useful for studying the products of music scenes as they
mobilise not only the social and ideological work of the ‘scene’, but also
their wider role in reproducing or transforming the social structures that
scenes are situated within.
This intersection between where the text is located—physically,
temporally, geographically and ideologically—and the kinds of things the
22 C. Hoad

text can ‘do’ (and indeed, what can in turn be done to the text) is partic-
ularly useful in the context of popular music studies. However, textual
analysis has also had a long and vital history in the context of Whiteness
Studies and postcolonial theory. Edward Said, Stuart Hall and bell hooks
have definitively shown the ways in which texts act as racialised regimes
of representation (c.f. Hall, 1997) which construct and maintain imagin-
ings of ‘Others’ and the physical and cultural contexts they occupy (c.f.
Said, [1979] 1991); and furthermore, present such contexts as sites for
exotic consumption by white, western audiences (hooks, 1991). In the
context of Whiteness Studies, Dawn Burton (2009) notes that ‘recent
emphasis on language, wordplay, discourse analysis and the interpreta-
tion of texts, including literary ones, has been an instrumental feature in
the growth of literature on whiteness’ (2009: 172). If we are to consider
whiteness, as Burton suggests, as a theoretical tool or lens through which
social, institutional and textual relations can be examined and made
visible (2009: 174), then analysing, questioning and challenging the
received ideas and orthodoxies that emerge through images, words, and
sounds is key to engaging with the intersections of metal and nation-
hood, as both have been represented and experienced within what Toni
Morrison has called ‘the gaze of whiteness’ (1992).
Margaret L. Andersen provides a framework for mapping the contri-
butions of Whiteness Studies literature thus: the recognition that white-
ness is ubiquitous, but not typically acknowledged; that whiteness is a
system of privilege, and that all racial categories are constructed, albeit
with ‘radically different consequences’ (2003: 24). In tracking analyses of
whiteness towards a third wave,1 France Winddance Twine and Charles
Gallagher (2008) observe that research must address whiteness not as
a uniform category but as a series of contextual expressions (2008: 6).
‘Whiteness’ as a site of critical interrogation has its roots in the earliest
intellectual projects of black American scholars such as W. E. B DuBois,
who provided the foundations for this body of scholarship. The forma-
tion of white identities, ideologies and cultural practices that were used
to reinforce white supremacy was integral to DuBois’ work, wherein he
mapped the structural realities of racism and race relations within the
United States (The Philadelphia Negro, [1899] 2007). Whiteness Studies
as a focused field of inquiry, however, gained momentum in the 1990s
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 23

with the exponential growth of texts that examine the role whiteness
and white identities play in framing and reworking racial categories,
hierarchies and boundaries.
Such scholarship has examined and exposed the often invisible or
masked power relations within existing racial hierarchies (Twine &
Gallagher, 2008: 5) that allow whiteness to be cast as both a visible,
victimised identity (Bode, 2006; Gallagher, 2004; Wellman, 1993) and
have its power relations hidden, so as to allow its position as a benign
cultural signifier (Dyer, 1997). Third wave Whiteness Studies, building
on the existing research of the first and second waves of the 1990s
and 2000s, has taken as its analytical starting point the understanding
that whiteness is not, and never has been, a static or uniform cate-
gory of social identification (Roediger, 2005). In this way whiteness
emerges not as a hegemonic category, but as a multiplicity of identities
that are, for Twine and Gallagher, historically grounded, class specific,
politically manipulated and gendered social locations that ‘inhabit
local custom and national sentiments within the context of the new
“global village”’ (2008: 6). These ‘white inflections’ (Twine & Gallagher,
2008: 5), the nuanced and locally specific ways in which whiteness is
defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented, are thus crucial
to engaging with the whiteness of heavy metal, and furthermore the
multiple whitenesses it enfolds.
Studies of whiteness, and indeed the field of Whiteness Studies itself,
are not without criticisms. Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race
Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993), for example, offers a
framework for addressing the structuring mechanisms of whiteness. For
Frankenberg,

To speak of ‘the social construction of whiteness’ asserts that there are

locations, discourses and material relations to which the term ‘whiteness’
applies… whiteness refers to a set of locations that are historically, socially,
politically, and culturally produced and, moreover, are intrinsically linked
to unfolding relations of domination. (1993: 6)

Frankenberg’s framework has, however, invited criticisms—its ‘self-

satisfied moralism’(Ferrier, 2002: 122) can be seen to lend her writing
24 C. Hoad

a particularly self-serving tone, particularly when, as Aileen Moreton-

Robinson has pointed out in Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2009),
white feminist theorists’ approach to whiteness and white-race privi-
lege often fails to appreciate that ‘their position as situated knowers
within white race privilege is inextricably connected to the systematic
racism they criticise but do not experience’ (2009: xx). The capacity to
share information or interrogate one’s analysis can be easily made from
the location of privilege and power (Moreton-Robinson, 2009: 129).
Frankenberg tracks the perils of this herself (1993: 32–35), noting that
speaking about whiteness can often appear solipsistic and further the
trajectory of white intellectualism (c.f. Fine et al., 2004: xii).
Moving discussions of whiteness into the context of leisure spaces and
practices has necessitated a similar awareness of these criticisms. Karl
Spracklen in Whiteness and Leisure (2013a) acknowledges the potential
risks in applying critical whiteness theory to studies of leisure spaces,
noting that such endeavours may essentialise racial identities, or ‘recreate
hierarchies of belonging based on fixed ontological categories of ‘race’
or ethnicity’ (2013a: 1). Spracklen argues that whiteness is always being
constructed, challenged and redefined and that research should then
show how whiteness and constellations of whiteness and Otherness are
(re)produced in and through leisure, and how the problematic ontolog-
ical category of ‘race’ is implicated (2013a: 1). For Spracklen, leisure
is a form and space where inequalities of power are refracted through
social structures, and material and cultural power is at work making
constructions of whiteness unproblematic (2013a: 1).
Mapping how cultural spaces (re)produce and (de)problematise white-
ness must then be a key aspect of understanding how whiteness unfolds
within the texts of leisure consumption, such as music. Simon Frith
(Sound Effects, [1978] 1987) argues that popular music, and particularly
rock music, has always been violently embedded within the tensions of
black performance and white entertainment. The concept of entertain-
ment itself ‘has always been critical to the social relationships of blacks
and whites; rock musicians, in using black musical forms, were drawing
on particular conventions of emotional expression but also on an argu-
ment about leisure and freedom’ (1987: 22). For Frith, leisure is a site
that affords privilege, entertainment and relaxation only to white bodies
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 25

and allows blackness only to exist as a form of entertainment. From the

beginning of slavery, he claims, ‘entertainment’ was established as the
norm for black/white cultural relations (1987: 22). This matter of ‘black
life and death’ became a source of white relaxation, and this polemic
of white leisure and black servitude is situated within a wider racialist
discourse that casts white identity as the norm, and black bodies as spec-
tacles for entertainment (Frith, 1987: 22). Frith further argues that this
depreciation of black bodies casts black cultures as sites that could be
plundered for musical styles, which are subsequently stripped of their
blackness (1987: 23).
Frith’s appraisal points to the means through which the privileged
position of whiteness becomes naturalised within sites of leisure and
consumption. The problem of this understanding of whiteness is never-
theless fairly straightforward: rather than mapping the structural and
social privilege that informs whiteness, whiteness is oft-positioned as the
essential opposite to ‘blackness’. In response to the wider trend of treating
whiteness as the uncritiqued opposite of blackness, Twine and Gallagher
argue that analyses of whiteness must address cultural sites such as music
as ‘popular spaces where collective white identities are produced and
white identities normalised’ (2008: 15).
Frith’s focus on young white men as the key participants in leisure
spheres is not unique to his work. In scholarly discussions of music and
leisure white men have been largely interpellated and represented as the
default practitioners, producers and consumers (c.f. Driscoll, 2002). This
is particularly evident in academic approaches to music subcultures. The
institution to which Subcultural Studies owes its debt, the University
of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS),
produced work that affirmed the centrality of white masculinity within
musical sites and cultures. The Birmingham School’s otherwise vital
discussions of youth and youth cultures were characterised by a focus on
the cultures of young men (major examples include Clarke, 1973; Clarke
& Jefferson, 1973; Hebdige, [1974] 1979; Jefferson, 1973), thereby
shaping much of the subsequent discourse on subcultures to exclude
femininity.2 Race is further omitted in these studies and other exam-
ples from this period: Frith’s discussion of ‘girl culture’ (1987: 225) is
concerned with white ‘girls’ and does not map the intersections of gender
26 C. Hoad

and race for women in the same way that he (briefly) does for the male
music communities in his work. Hebdige proffers insights into a ‘white
ethnicity’ (1979: 65) asserted by punk subcultures in Britain, but again
often situates whiteness as the binary opposite of blackness.
Criticism of the CCCS’s conception of subculture has thus focused on
the narrowness of and exclusions inherent within these studies. Angela
McRobbie responds to the gender imbalance in traditional accounts of
subculture, noting that the masculinisation of subcultures means ‘the
style of a subculture is primarily that of its men’ ([1980] 2006: 60).
Furthermore, because subcultural research took as its subjects those who
were ‘other’ to capitalist hegemony, subcultures that did not conform to
its definitions were disparaged or ignored. Heavy metal in particular is a
clear casualty of the CCCS’s rigid conceptual framework for resistance;
as Andy R. Brown has noted, heavy metal was simply invisible to the
radar of subcultural theory (2003: 212).
In response to the exclusory and homogenising tendencies of the
CCCS’s subcultural model, researchers have looked to ‘scene’ as an alter-
native. Will Straw advocates for a use of the term to address ‘a cultural
space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each
other’ (1991: 373). Andy Bennett and Richard Peterson build upon
this to use ‘music scene’ to designate the contexts in which producers,
musicians and fans ‘collectively share their common musical tastes and
collectively distinguish themselves from others’ (2004: 1). ‘Scene’ is not
without its criticisms: David Hesmondhalgh sees the term as fundamen-
tally ambiguous (2005), while Mark Olson criticises Straw’s depiction
of scenes as ‘empty vessels’ (1998: 271). Olson instead frames scenes as
‘territorialising machines’ (1998: 281) which create and mobilise partic-
ular kinds of relationships in given contexts. ‘Scene’, in this way, is a
much more productive tool through which to understand practices in
specific spatial and temporal locations, where texts themselves are key
tools in enacting and sustaining this territorialisation.
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 27

Deconstructing the Default Metal Fan

Despite the academic turn to ‘scene’, loose theorisations of ‘subculture’
have been occasionally applied in conventional analyses of heavy metal.
Such uses are represented within a ‘wider public sphere’ (Bennett, 1999:
605) where disparate practices are collectively grouped together and
have hence created widely mediated discourses and images of default
heavy metal fans and practitioners. Dominant media representations of
metal fans and practitioners continue to centre on white men; Rosemary
Overell (2012) observes that media representations of metal fans have
historically been of ‘homologously deviant’ (2012: 28) young white men
with long hair, jeans and t-shirts. Spracklen notes the inherent whiteness
of heavy metal’s popular image thus:

[H]eavy metal remains in the West a strongly white musical subculture—

a music for white trash, played by white men with long hair and beards,
listened to by white folk who want to be associated with its faux-outlaw
status… It is sold by the industry as white music, and black musicians
playing metal have to work hard to be accepted as ‘true’ metallers. (2013a:
98)

Heavy metal’s commonly disseminated image is hence one of young

white men seeking deviance and rebellion. In the earliest scholarly
discussions of heavy metal culture, the whiteness of metal, and its polit-
ical significance therein, is near-absent in its articulation. Heavy metal
was largely neglected in early cultural studies of popular music; where
mentions of metal do appear, it is largely discussed in relation to class
dynamics. Willis’ brief mentions of heavy metal in Profane Culture
(1978) correlate it with the working-class ‘biker’ youth subculture, yet
the study makes minimal moves towards engaging with the gender or
racial politics of metal. Will Straw, in perhaps the earliest piece of
academic scholarship directly focused on metal, side-steps metal’s white-
ness by pointing to hostilities between disco audiences, who are racialised
as black and Hispanic (1984: 111) and metal audiences who, while
‘heavily male-dominated’ (1984: 115), receive no ethnic categorisation.
28 C. Hoad

Early moral-panic literature3 again presents white, male suburban

youths as the core audience for heavy metal. Tipper Gore, in Raising PG
Kids in an X-Rated Society (1987) argues that metal audiences largely
consist of adolescent ‘boys’ aged between 12 and 19; Carl Raschke
(Painted Black, 1990), argues that metal’s ‘prime listening audience’
consists of adolescents aged 13–18 (1990: 271) who form a ‘neural
bond’ (1990: 274) with the music, which he characterises as a ‘challenge
directly the values of Christian civilisation’ (1990: 281) and ‘aesthetic
terrorism’ (1990: 281). Gore and Raschke’s texts have not aged particu-
larly well, other than as moral panic novelties: both treat heavy metal
and its fans as homogeneous, and refuse to acknowledge the genre’s
dynamism and pluralism.
Such textual imaginings of metal scene members as long haired, young
white men nonetheless persisted well past Tipper Gore’s heyday. Jeffrey
Arnett’s book Metalheads (1996) characterises ‘the heavy metal subcul-
ture’ as ‘largely male’, where heavy metal ‘largely reflects them [young
men] and their concerns’ (1996: xi). Arnett notes that interviews were
undertaken with nearly twice as many men as women, where the 38
young women interviewed are discussed only in one chapter of the book.
The limited nature of Arnett’s sample goes beyond gendered lines: of
the nine fans he profiles in-depth, seven are white men, one is a white
woman, and one a black man. ‘Reggie’, a black teenager, is described as
‘not a typical metalhead’ by virtue of ‘his appearance’ and ‘not look[ing]
the part’ (1996: 111). A further example emerges in Donna Gaines’
Teenage Wasteland ([1990] 1998), wherein the text associates metal
fandom with the ‘crisis’ of youth culture under the Reagan adminis-
tration in the U.S. Gaines positions metal fans as angry white young
men—‘male white suburban teenagers’ (1998: 181)—and observes that
‘when the guys go to see Slayer, for the most part, the girls will stay
home’ (1998: 118). Gaines nevertheless makes observations towards the
political significance of metal’s whiteness—heavy metal is ‘the white-race
music of empire’ (1998: 180) and ‘white suburban soul music’ (1998:
181). The problems with such textual representations are nonetheless
largely the same as their predecessors: these texts offer no discussion
of fans external to North America, and ‘metalheads’ are defined as a
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 29

homogeneous group through appeals to their ostensibly shared, white

and heterosexual masculinity.
The positioning of the ‘default fan’ as a young, white, North Amer-
ican or Western European male is not unique to the early moral panic
literature surrounding heavy metal. Katharine Ellis, writing in 2009,
argues that ‘demographic research shows that the typical heavy metal
fan, almost worldwide, is male, white, aged around twelve to twenty-
two, and working class (or lower-middle class embracing a working class
ethos)’ (2009: 54). ‘Almost worldwide’ is a readily debatable quantifier
given the well-documented growth of heavy metal scenes worldwide.
Ellis further characterises the subculture as ‘young, white, heterosexual
male’ (2009: 54), drawn from an older observation by Deena Weinstein
([1991] 2000). Weinstein, in the foundational text Heavy Metal: The
Music and its Culture ([1991] 2000), argues that whiteness, alongside
youth, working-class identity and masculinity, forms a key demographic
factor in determining the structure of heavy metal as both a musical
style and subcultural site (2000: 102). Weinstein argues that metal is a
predominantly white genre (2000: 111), though the ways in which this
dominance is realised have exceeded the traditional boundaries of simple
demographics. As such, Weinstein makes an important move when she
observes that whiteness is not merely a demographic category, but has a
cultural significance within metal (Weinstein, 2000: 111).
Weinstein argues that the valorisation of ‘white’ in metal culture
emerged as both a response to the changing social position of people of
colour and the severing of certain white youths from ‘black’ music (2000:
112). Metal emerges concurrently with a desire to establish ‘roots’ for
whiteness in an Anglo-American context (Weinstein, 2000: 113). The
cultural significance of ‘white’ in metal, she then argues, may not be
overtly or necessarily covertly racist—it is less an affirmation of white-
ness than it is an ‘obtrusive absence’ of blackness (2000: 111). Weinstein
makes appeals to fanbases in Japan and Brazil (2000: 111), the growth
of Hispanic metal audiences within the United States (2000: 112–113),
and an account of a black fan who was nervous about attending a Rush
concert (2000: 112) to argue that metal is not racist ‘on principle’, but
rather ‘exclusivist’ in its insistence on upholding the ‘codes of its core
30 C. Hoad

membership’ (2000: 112). Such an approach however pays little atten-

tion to the possibility that such exclusivist codes may be almost entirely
an affirmation of whiteness—to argue that a genre which has, in her
own description, sought to sever associations with ‘black’ cultural forms
(2000: 112), is then simply coincidental in its whiteness oversimplifies
a complex dynamic. Discussing whiteness wholly in terms of the pres-
ence or absence of racism is reductive; furthermore, it allows a discussion
of whiteness to emerge only when it manifests in explicitly xenophobic
displays. Arguing that the white demographic base of metal has not been
given cultural expression as a racial value, ‘either in the pro-white or
anti-black sense’ (Weinstein, 2000: 113) ignores the affirmative site for
whiteness that heavy metal—and indeed the early literature surrounding
it—offers.
The scholarly understanding of whiteness as an absence of blackness is
thus the first, and most comprehensive, manifestation of whiteness that
I critique within the literature on heavy metal. Reducing discussions
of race in metal to black/white binaries is not an uncommon practice
within the academy. Robert Walser, in Running With the Devil: Power,
Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (1993), argues that the global
spread of metal means that scene members at large are no longer ‘over-
whelmingly white’ (1993: 17); but that heavy metal nonetheless remains
a ‘white-dominated discourse’ (1993: 17). Walser’s notion of metal as
a ‘white-dominated discourse’ is a significant observation that points to
whiteness and its embedded ideologies as a central structuring framework
for heavy metal culture, even as the genre continues to expand.
Walser’s assertion of the role of discourse in sustaining metal’s white-
ness remains a vital observation. Nevertheless, Walser parlays this into
a discussion of virtuosity and black/white musicological polemics, as
discussed later in this chapter. Such distinctions are also present within
literature focused on the development of extreme metal and its nuanced
subgenres, particularly death and black metal. Natalie Purcell (in Death
Metal Music, 2003) situates metallic whiteness in a black/white binary.
Purcell states that studies have found that metalheads are dispropor-
tionately white (2003: 105), a demographic statistic she attributes
to a combination of internet access and location (2003: 105). Where
Weinstein argues that ‘the heavy metal subculture is less a racially based
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 31

than cultural grouping’ (2000: 113), Purcell offers a similar appraisal of

metal’s demographic whiteness, arguing that it plays a role in providing
a community or family for young white men in a way that is, ostensibly,
otherwise denied to them by the musics of ‘minorities’ (2003: 106).
Purcell claims that heavy metal, in fostering identity and a sense of
community, operates for white youth in the same way that rap music
does for ‘blacks’ (2003: 106), who are represented as a homogeneous
group. White people are more drawn to metal, she argues, because
‘many minorities already have a scene and a community which appeals
to their need for brotherhood and shared identity’ (2003: 106), and
quotes a magazine article which declares metal music to be ‘Gangsta
Rap’s white-kid counterpart’ (2003: 106). Such approaches speak of the
significance of metal’s whiteness without really talking about whiteness
at all; instead such rhetoric situates whiteness as the opposite of black-
ness, or whiteness as occluded from the category of ‘colour’, enclosing
all ‘minorities’ within the non-white position of this binary, and talking
about race in ways that elude white bodies.
The idea of a community of whiteness realised through shared class
identities and ‘particular ethnic traditions’ (Weinstein, 2000: 113) treats
whiteness as unraced, a practice which is manifest within metal literature.
Keith Kahn-Harris, in Extreme Metal (2007), while offering an otherwise
nuanced and complex interrogation of the exclusionary mechanisms of
race and Otherness in extreme metal scenes, still largely broaches the
whiteness of metal through discussing the absence of people of colour.
Kahn-Harris notes that researchers have generally asserted that metal
fans are predominantly young, white working-class males (2007: 70).
He dismantles both the ‘young’ and ‘working class’ aspects of such claims
by noting that situations vary across the globe—for example, he argues
that in parts of Asia and the Middle East, scenes appear to be domi-
nated by the wealthy (2007: 70). Kahn-Harris also cautions against using
data that suggests metal is predominantly white, male, heterosexual and
working class and applying it indiscriminately to all genres (2007: 11),
noting the emerging (at that time) studies of metal in non-American
global contexts.
In discussing the ethnic makeup of the extreme metal scene, Kahn-
Harris points to the absence of ‘those of black African descent’ aside from
32 C. Hoad

‘a few’ black musicians in UK and US metal scenes, the ‘notable absence’

and ‘marginality’ of those of Chinese descent, and contends that ‘South
Asians both within the subcontinent and in diaspora communities are
also barely involved in extreme metal scenes’ (2007: 70). Kahn-Harris
suggests that in most places scene members come from the ranks of
majority groups (2007: 70), and goes on to contend that ‘the absence
of certain ethnic groups is also linked to overt prejudice’ (2007: 77), a
valid point that he discusses in relation to the anti-Semitism experienced
by Israeli scene members (2007: 25, 77, 152; see also ‘I hate this fucking
country’, 2002). Kahn-Harris however retrenches the white music/black
music polemic entrenched by extant texts, stating that ‘the lack of black
scene members has nothing to do with overt prejudice since few have ever
shown an interest in joining the scene’ (2007: 77) and further arguing
that ‘self-exclusion plays a role’ (2007: 77). There is nonetheless a posi-
tive outcome for Kahn-Harris’ work. Extreme Metal , unlike earlier texts,
establishes a framework for exploring scenes external to the ‘traditional’
centre of heavy metal; Kahn-Harris’ caution against applying data that
caters to particular geographic and cultural locales to all genres of metal
in all places demonstrates the need for research to approach heavy metal
scenes in reflexive and progressive ways.

Class, Masculine Transgression

and Individuality
Michelle Phillipov, in Death Metal and Music Criticism (2012), supports
Kahn-Harris’ call for reflexive research. She argues that the global growth
of metal means that the genre can no longer be considered ‘straightfor-
wardly white’ (2012: 66). Phillipov contends that global metal studies
disrupt the previous orthodoxies of metal studies which totalised the
genre as an expression of white working-class disenfranchisement (2012:
66). Phillipov’s appraisal informs the second manifestation of whiteness
that I critique within metal literature: understandings of whiteness as
expressions of Western working-class masculinity. Just as examinations of
whiteness within metal literature have largely hinged on the apparent
absence of people of colour, the correlation of whiteness with Western
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 33

working-class identity becomes a defining trend of metal studies.

Weinstein ([1991] 2000) (and Walser [1993], to an extent) accounts
for the demographic significance of white men in metal scenes through
explorations of deindustrialisation and blue-collar disenchantment (this
is also broached by Gaines, 1998, see also Hanaken & Wells, 1990:
62–63; 1993: 60, 66).
Class has long been central to discussions of heavy metal. Dick
Hebdige, in an earlier and disparaging critique, characterised metal as
inherently working class, a ‘curious blend of hippy aesthetics and football
terrace machismo’ that attracted aficionados ‘distinguished by their long
hair, denim and ‘idiot’ dancing’ (1979: 155). Class and deindustrialisa-
tion then become a key context for theorising heavy metal (Berger, 1999:
283), where metal is seen to provide a conduit for anger and frustration
experienced by blue-collar (white, male) workers, albeit solely in a US
and UK context. Phillipov observes that ‘the frustrations of blue-collar
life in a declining economy are considered a crucial context for metal’
and that most substantial analyses have focused on this issue (2012: 54).
Weinstein (2000) maintains that ‘blue collar’, alongside ‘male’, ‘youth’
and ‘white’, is a key structuring mechanism of heavy metal subcultures,
claiming that ‘heavy metal has a class signification wherever it appears’
(2000: 113).
Blue collar offers an ‘ethos’ that Weinstein argues has meaning and
affective qualities—‘Blue collar mythologies replace the romance of black
culture in metal’s syllabus of rebellion’ (2000: 114). Walser (1993) also
makes a point of articulating the working-class origins of heavy metal
(180n.7) but notes that (then) recent marketing studies had conflicting
findings concerning the ‘class’ and locale of the audience, which shifted
between heavy concentrations in ‘blue-collar industrial cities’ (1993: 16)
to ‘upscale family suburbs’ (1993: 17). Walser thus criticises Weinstein
([1991] 2000) for rarely moving beyond descriptions of the pleasures of
metal—‘musical ecstasy, pride in subcultural allegiance, male bonding’—
towards placing metal fans within political contexts that make such
pleasures possible (1993: 24). ‘Blue collar’ identity and its romantici-
sation take on a mythic quality that caters to narratives of ‘authentic’
masculinity, where metal and its ostensibly homosocial environments are
seen to provide an outlet for the frustrations of such an identity therein.
34 C. Hoad

Discussions of gender within heavy metal then hinge largely on the

representation of metal music and its fan community as male domi-
nated, and as later work has interrogated, dominated by particular
kinds of masculinity. Weinstein notes that the heavy metal audience
is ‘more than just male; it is masculinist […] the heavy metal subcul-
ture, as a community with shared values, norms and behaviours, highly
esteems masculinity’ (2000: 104). Masculinity in metal is understood as
the binary opposite of femininity, and it is perilous to even question,
let alone play with or breach, the boundaries (2000: 104). Weinstein
extends this observation to a brief discussion of the experiences of homo-
sexual men in metal (2000: 105–106) to point to the culture’s heteronor-
mativity. While important, such an observation only allows metal’s
sexual politics to be mapped within a heterosexual/homosexual binary
that serves only cisgendered men and excises the scope of LGBTQI+
identities. The dependence on such a dichotomy, as Amber Clifford-
Napoleone has argued (2015), has denied the pervasiveness of queer
identities and politics in the metal ethos and has limited scholarship on
gender and sexuality within metal scenes so as to retrench popular and
academic imaginings of metal as inherently masculine. For Weinstein,
however, the ‘boundaries’ of metal are wholly enclosed within the logic
of authentic masculinity/commercialised femininity. Weinstein goes on
to speculate whether such aggressive masculinity supports the strength
of patriarchy or is a defensive response to the ‘weakening’ of male hege-
mony (2000: 104), suggesting that ‘heavy metal music celebrates the very
qualities that boys must sacrifice [freedom, individuality, power] in order
to become adult members of society’ (2000: 105).
Such a reading of metal’s masculinist codes is not invalid; rather, it
is limited by an understanding of masculinity as an essentialist cate-
gory. Weinstein makes important connections between a culture of
masculinity and the construction of community—‘[the] male chau-
vinism and misogyny that characterise the metal subculture are tempered
by its sense of community’ (2000: 105)—but she does little to locate
the discourses and contexts that enable such performative masculinity.
Rather this research caters to an essentialist view that suggests masculinity
is automatically conferred upon male bodies in the same way, in all
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 35

contexts. The masculine space of heavy metal and its attendant authen-
ticity naturalises the presence of men within the scene, but exoticises
women. An initial example of this emerges within Weinstein’s analysis,
where she divides women between those who engage with metal ‘prop-
erly’ (i.e. in ways commensurate with masculine belonging) and those
who are seen to reiterate stereotypical ‘feminine’ behaviour (2000: 105).4
Further instances of such authentic masculine codes emerge in the
‘den mother’/‘band whore’ binary explored in Sonia Vasan’s work (2010),
and Gaines’ observation that male fans felt women pretended to like
metal to get attention (1998: 118). Another instance of this divisive
rhetoric occurs within Leigh Krenske and Jim McKay’s account of gender
relations in a Brisbane heavy metal club (2000). Krenske and McKay
found that the scene was largely male-dominated and defined through
masculinist codes. They subsequently categorise women into groups
whose distinctions are entirely based on their interactions with men
(2000: 295). By claiming that the few women who manage to ‘infiltrate
the scene’ succeed by ‘conforming to masculinist scripts’ (2000: 290),
Krenske and McKay suggest that such scripts are automatically conferred
upon men, who are not required to engage in the same performative
identity work. Similarly, this assertion ignores the salience of male perfor-
mativity in reproducing hegemonic gender narratives not only within the
space of the scene, but also external to it as well.
The notion that masculinist codes determine the behaviours of the
scene is an important one. However, rarely does such work of this period
offer critique of the fact that within their respective samples, it is always
(white, heterosexual) men who determine who is treated as an ‘equal’
and under what circumstances. Furthermore, such research can over-
look how men are granted these privileges, or the codes to which they
comply, while women are forced to prove themselves worthy of legitimate
belonging. Walser interrogates Western constructions of masculinity and
their enmeshment within heavy metal scenes, noting that heavy metal
often ‘stages fantasies of masculine virtuosity and control’ (1993: 108),
and that metal is, ‘inevitably, a discourse shaped by patriarchy’ (1993:
109). Walser offers a much more nuanced critique of the means through
36 C. Hoad

which gender is experienced within metal cultures, articulating the polit-

ical position of the young men who are seen to dominate the genre—
lacking in social, physical and economic power yet besieged by cultural
messages that insist upon such forms as vital attributes of masculinity
(1993: 109). Walser moves towards a post-structuralist critique, arguing
that sex and gender roles are social constructions rather than normative
biological functions, and that heavy metal offers a site for doing ‘iden-
tity work’ and ‘accomplishing gender’ (1993: 109). For Walser, ‘notions
of gender circulate in the texts, sounds, images and practices of heavy
metal, and fans experience confirmation and alteration of their gendered
identities through their involvement with it’ (1993: 109). Walser himself
notes that studies of metal that naturalise the position of (white) men do
a disservice to female fans (1993: 110)—nonetheless, he goes on to note
that ‘since the language and traditions have been developed by and are
still dominated by men, [his] discussion of gender in metal [is] initially
an investigation of masculinity’ (1993: 110).
Walser argues that hegemony is enmeshed within the structuring prac-
tices of heavy metal. He contends that the purpose of a genre is to
‘organise the reproduction of a particular ideology’ of white masculinity
(1993: 109), and for much of heavy metal’s history its generic cohesion
depended not only on the exscription of femininity from metal (1993:
11) but also upon the ‘desire of young white male performers and fans to
hear and believe in certain stories about the nature of masculinity’ (1993:
110). Walser urges researchers to further unpack these stories in critical
and analytical ways. Walser’s approach to gender is not without its faults.
While Walser criticises Weinstein for overlooking women’s responses to
metal as an attempt to ‘efface her own participation’ (as though her
participation is contingent upon her gender) (1993: 23), he does not
extend the same criticism to other researchers for the gender imbal-
ance in their work. Furthermore, he largely associates metal’s virtuosity
with men (1993: 57) and discusses women’s participation almost wholly
in relation to glam metal, and particularly glam metal fandom (1993:
132), furthering the association of girls with ostensibly commercialised
and superficial mass culture as opposed to more ‘authentic’ styles (1993:
130). Walser also echoes Weinstein’s argument that women gain power in
metal scenes through channelling masculine codes—he notes that he has
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 37

‘observed and interviewed female fans who dress, act and interpret just
like male fans’ (1993: 132), tacitly reinscribing male fans as the standard
bearer.
Literature which decries, exscribes and is suspicious of femininity
within metal scenes corresponds to, rather than critiques, the dominant
textual practices of heteronormative heavy metal cultures. This scholar-
ship represents a culture that prizes ‘acceptable’ modes of belonging—
masculine, heterosexual, white and powerful—yet uses discussions of
transgression and individual power as a foil. Beyond these discussions
of gender, more empowering approaches emerge within Kahn-Harris’
(2007) and Overell’s (2012) analyses of gendered engagement and indi-
vidual agency within scenes. Kahn-Harris argues that extreme metal’s
focus on transgression allows young women to exercise agency over their
own subcultural practices and thus access individual power. He then
introduces the term ‘transgressive subcultural capital’ (2007: 179) as a
scenic resource that offers women (amongst others) a chance to subvert
notions of mainstream gender performatives and therefore engage in a
transgressive act that enables a sense of self and empowerment—‘they
prefer aggressive music that nice girls do not listen to’ (2007: 76). ‘Nice
girls’ here however reiterates the same problem as the ‘resistance’ model
that often plagued the CCCS: situating women ‘outside’ metal within
such a category retrenches the compliant femininity/anti-authoritarian
masculinity binary and situates masculinity as the dominant code of
behaviour.
In response to such valorisations of anti-authoritarian masculinity,
Rosemary Overell (2012) introduces the term ‘brutal belonging’ to
capture an individual’s successful participation in a scene. In valuing
‘brutality’ (in Overell’s study, the term is shorthand for both a feeling
of affective intensity and a disavowal of commercialism, passivity and
conformity, see also ‘[I] hate girls and emo[tion]s’, 2013), such an
approach attempts to disassociate these qualities from any essential
masculinity, whiteness or heteronormativity. Instead, Overell’s ‘brutality’
places the onus on individuals’ capacity for and displays of affective
intensity. Overell notes that scenes are still permeated by manifesta-
tions of misogyny, racism and homophobia. ‘Brutal belonging’, however,
38 C. Hoad

allows for a more readily accessible model of subcultural capital accumu-

lation that does not depend on rigid somatotypes as a condition of entry,
but rather an individual’s capacity to prove themselves worthy of inclu-
sion within the scene. While Kahn-Harris’ and Overell’s approach situate
masculinist codes as the default norm that dictate scenic behaviours and
acceptability, they also offer means through which scene members who
would otherwise be marginalised have been able to exploit and critique
such codes to mark out their own scenic spaces.5
Despite these explorations of personal agency in relation to gender and
race in recent work, the legacy of metal’s dominant representations in
literature continues to have long-standing implications. Jeremy Wallach,
in recent work with Esther Clinton, has argued that musicians of colour
are central to the metal landscape (2015: 275), and that claims to any
racial homogeneity and racism within heavy metal ‘both magnifies the
problem and trivialises the experiences and dedication of the millions of
metalheads of colour’ (2015: 275). Wallach and Clinton rightfully argue
that conceiving of metal as universally white denies agency to people
of colour; nonetheless there remains work to be done in interrogating
the hostile global dialectic between people of colour, who are situated
as Others, and a musical culture that overwhelmingly understands and
defines its centre and origins within the white working class. Further-
more, research in this vein can further attend to the negative aspects
of a culture that stresses individual empowerment and personal agency,
often at the expense of collective efforts to confront bigotry and exclusory
politics.

Spectacular Whiteness and Racism

Understanding heavy metal as a site of free-thinking, free speech and
individual agency has the potential side effect of allowing metal scenes
to be more tolerant spaces for racism, sexism and homophobia (c.f.
Berger, 1999; Dawes, 2012). Harris Berger maps this struggle in Metal,
Rock and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience
(1999), noting that death metal scenes exercise a ‘radical tolerance’
(1999: 281) that creates tensions between what he sees as death metal’s
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
essay being indicated.

ROBERT BURNS
It is pleasant to be able to let Dr. Holmes, who was present at the
Burns Festival, speak for himself and Lowell and Judge Hoar of Mr.
Emerson’s speech on that day. I have heard the Judge tell the story
of his friend’s success with the same delight.
“On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns
Festival, held at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial
Anniversary of the poet’s birth. He spoke, after the dinner, to the
great audience with such beauty and eloquence that all who listened
to him have remembered it as one of the most delightful addresses
they ever heard. Among his hearers was Mr. Lowell, who says of it
that ‘every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the
clouds.’ Judge Hoar, who was another of his hearers, says that,
though he has heard many of the chief orators of his time, he never
witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself present
on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these
gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced.
His words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow
most natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar
with, but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his
inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.”
The strange part of all the accounts given by the hearers is that
Mr. Emerson seemed to speak extempore, which can hardly have
been so.
No account of the Festival, or Mr. Emerson’s part therein, appears
in the journals, except a short page of praise of the felicitous
anecdotes introduced by other after-dinner speakers.
Page 440, note 1. Here comes out that respect for labor which
affected all Mr. Emerson’s relations to the humblest people he met.
In the Appendix to the Poems it appears in the verses beginning,—
Said Saadi, When I stood before
Hassan the camel-driver’s door.

Page 441, note 1. Thomas Carlyle.

Page 441, note 2. Mr. Emerson here recalls his childhood and that
of his brothers, as in the passage in “Domestic Life,” in Society and
Solitude, that has been often referred to in these notes.
Page 443, note 1. Among some stray lecture-sheets was the
following on the scholar or poet:—
“Given the insight, and he will find as many beauties and heroes
and strokes of genius close by him as Dante or Shakspeare beheld.
It was in a cold moor farm, in a dingy country inn, that Burns found
his fancy so sprightly. You find the times and places mean. Stretch a
few threads over an Æolian harp, and put it in the window and listen
to what it says of the times and of the heart of Nature. You shall not
believe the miracle of Nature is less, the chemical power worn out.
Watch the breaking morning, or the enchantments of the sunset.”

SHAKSPEARE
The following notes on Shakspeare were written by Mr. Emerson
for the celebration in Boston by the Saturday Club of the Three
Hundredth Anniversary of the poet’s birth.
In Mr. Cabot’s Memoir of Emerson, vol. ii., page 621, apropos of
Mr. Emerson’s avoidance of impromptu speech on public occasions,
is this statement:—
“I remember his getting up at a dinner of the Saturday Club on the
Shakspeare anniversary in 1864, to which some guests had been
invited, looking about him tranquilly for a minute or two, and then
sitting down; serene and unabashed, but unable to say a word upon
a subject so familiar to his thoughts from boyhood.”
Yet on the manuscript of this address Mr. Emerson noted that it
was read at the Club’s celebration on that occasion, and at the
Revere House. (“Parker’s” was the usual gathering-place of the
Club.) The handwriting of this note shows that Mr. Emerson wrote it
in his later years, so it is very possible that Mr. Cabot was right. Mr.
Emerson perhaps forgot to bring his notes with him to the dinner,
and so did not venture to speak. And the dinner may have been at
“Parker’s.”

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

The Boston Society of Natural History celebrated the One
Hundredth Anniversary of the birth of Humboldt. Dr. Robert C.
Waterston presided at the Music Hall, where Agassiz made the
address. In the evening there was a reception in Horticultural Hall.
The occasion was made memorable by the Society by the founding
of a Humboldt and Agassiz scholarship in the Museum of
Comparative Zoölogy in Cambridge.
Poems by Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Howe were read. Professor E. J.
Young and Dr. Charles T. Jackson gave reminiscences of Humboldt;
Colonel Higginson, the Rev. Dr. Hedge and others spoke. Mr.
Emerson’s remarks are taken from an abstract given in the account
of the celebration published by the Society.

WALTER SCOTT
Although Mr. Emerson, in the period between 1838 and 1848
especially, when considering the higher powers of poetry, spoke
slightingly of Scott,—in the Dial papers as “objective” and “the poet
of society, of patrician and conventional Europe,” or in English Traits
as a writer of “a rhymed travellers’ guide to Scotland,”—he had
always honor for the noble man, and affectionate remembrance for
the poems as well as the novels. In the poem “The Harp,” when
enumerating poets, he calls Scott “the delight of generous boys,” but
the generosus puer was his own delight; the hope of the generation
lay in him, and his own best audience was made up of such. In the
essay “Illusions,” he says that the boy “has no better friend than
Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch and Homer. The man lives to other
objects, but who dare affirm that they are more real?” In the essay
“Aristocracy,” he names among the claims of a superior class,
“Genius, the power to affect the Imagination,” and presently speaks
of “those who think and paint and laugh and weep in their eloquent
closets, and then convert the world into a huge whispering-gallery, to
report the tale to all men and win smiles and tears from many
generations,” and gives Scott and Burns among the high company
whom he instances.
Mr. Emerson’s children can testify how with regard to Scott he
always was ready to become a boy again. As we walked in the
woods, he would show us the cellar-holes of the Irish colony that
came to Concord to build the railroad, and he named these deserted
villages Derncleugh and Ellangowan. The sight recalled Meg
Merrilies’ pathetic lament to the laird at the eviction of the gypsies,
which he would then recite. “Alice Brand,” the “Sair Field o’ Harlaw,”
which old Elspeth sings to the children in The Antiquary, and
“Helvellyn” were again and again repeated to us with pleasure on
both sides. With special affection in later years when we walked in
Walden woods he would croon the lines from “The Dying Bard,”—

“Dinas Emlinn, lament, for the moment is nigh,

When mute in the woodlands thine echoes shall die.”

Perhaps he had foreboding for his loved woods, beginning to be

desecrated with rude city picnics, and since burned over repeatedly
by the fires from the railroad,—

“When half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die.”

Of this poem he wrote in the journal of 1845:—

“‘Dinas Emlinn’ of Scott, like his ‘Helvellyn,’ shows how near to a
poet he was. All the Birmingham part he had, and what taste and
sense! Yet never rose into the creative region. As a practitioner or
professional poet he is unrivalled in modern times.” Yet he
immediately adds, “In lectures on Poetry almost all Scott would be to
be produced.”
Page 463, note 1. Mr. Emerson took especial pleasure in the
passage in the Lord of the Isles where the old abbot, rising to
denounce excommunicated Bruce to his foes, is inspired against his
will to bless him and prophesy his triumph as Scotland’s deliverer.
Mr. Emerson, writing in his journal in 1842 of his impatience of
superficial city life, during a visit to New York, alludes to the renewed
comfort he had in the Lord of the Isles:
“Life goes headlong. Each of us is always to be found hurrying
headlong in the chase of some fact, hunted by some fear or
command behind us. Suddenly we meet a friend. We pause. Our
hurry and empressement look ridiculous.... When I read the Lord of
the Isles last week at Staten Island, and when I meet my friend, I
have the same feeling of shame at having allowed myself to be a
mere huntsman and follower.”
His boyish love for the Lay of the Last Minstrel remained through
life. As we walked on Sunday afternoons he recited to his children
the stanzas about “the custom of Branksome Hall,” and the passage
where the Ladye of Branksome defies the spirits of the flood and fell;
and the bleak mile of road between Walden woods and home would
often call out from him

“The way was long, the wind was cold,

The Minstrel was infirm and old,” etc.

Page 465, note 1. The Bride of Lammermoor was the only dreary
tale that Mr. Emerson could abide, except Griselda.
Journal, 1856. “Eugène Sue, Dumas, etc., when they begin a
story, do not know how it will end, but Walter Scott, when he began
the Bride of Lammermoor, had no choice; nor Shakspeare, nor
Macbeth.”
Page 467, note 1. Journal. “We talked of Scott. There is some
greatness in defying posterity and writing for the hour.”
 SPEECH AT THE BANQUET IN HONOR OF THE
CHINESE EMBASSY
When the Chinese Embassy visited Boston in the summer of 1868
a banquet was given them at the St. James Hotel, on August 21. The
young Emerson, sounding an early note of independence of the
past, had written in 1824:—

I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze,

The bald antiquity of China praise;—

but later he learned to revere the wisdom of Asia. About the time
when the Dial appeared, many sentences of Chinese wisdom are
found in his journal, and also in the magazine among the “Ethnical
Scriptures.”

REMARKS AT THE ORGANIZATION OF THE

FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION
In the spring of 1867, a call for a public meeting was issued by
Octavius B. Frothingham, William J. Potter and Rowland Connor “to
consider the conditions, wants and progress of Free Religion in
America.” The response was so large as to surprise the committee,
and Horticultural Hall was completely filled on May 30. Rev. Octavius
B. Frothingham presided. The committee had invited as speakers
the Rev. H. Blanchard of Brooklyn from the Universalists, Lucretia
Mott from the Society of Friends, Robert Dale Owen from the
Spiritualists, the Rev. John Weiss from the Left Wing of the
Unitarians, Oliver Johnson from the Progressive Friends, Francis E.
Abbot, editor of the Index; and also David A. Wasson, Colonel T. W.
Higginson and Mr. Emerson. The meeting was very successful and
the Free Religious Association was founded.
Mr. Emerson’s genial and affirmative attitude at this meeting was
helpful and important. He wished the new movement to be neither
aggressive towards the beliefs of others, nor merely a religion of
works, purely beneficently utilitarian. Doubtless there were many
young and active radicals strong for destructive criticism. Mr.
Emerson wished to see that in their zeal to destroy the dry husk of
religion they should not bruise the white flower within. His counsel to
young men was, “Omit all negative propositions. It will save ninety-
nine one hundredths of your labor, and increase the value of your
work in the same measure.”
Page 479, note 1. In the journal of 1837 he said, “Why rake up old
manuscripts to find therein a man’s soul? You do not look for
conversation in a corpse.” And elsewhere, “In religion the sentiment
is all, the ritual or ceremony indifferent.”

SPEECH AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF

THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION
Page 486, note 1. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe writes of Mr. Emerson,—
“He knew from the first the victory of good over evil; and when he
told me, to my childish amazement, that the angel must always be
stronger than the demon, he gave utterance to a thought most
familiar to him, though at the time new to me.”[L]
Page 488, note 1. In the essay on Character (Lectures and
Biographical Sketches), he says, “The establishment of Christianity
in the world does not rest on any miracle but the miracle of being the
broadest and most humane doctrine.”
“The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a
false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover
and the falling rain.”—“Address in Divinity College,” Nature,
Addresses and Lectures.
Page 490, note 1. Mr. Emerson’s doctrine was not to attack
beliefs, but give better: “True genius will not impoverish, but will
liberate.” In a letter to one of his best friends who had joined the
Church of Rome he said, perhaps in 1858: “To old eyes how
supremely unimportant the form under which we celebrate the
justice, love and truth, the attributes of the deity and the soul!”
Page 491, note 1. Dr. Holmes, in his tribute to his friend, after his
death, read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, said:—
“What could we do with this unexpected, unprovided for,
unclassified, half unwelcome newcomer, who had been for a while
potted, as it were, in our Unitarian cold greenhouse, but had taken to
growing so fast that he was lifting off its glass roof and letting in the
hail-storms? Here was a protest that outflanked the extreme left of
liberalism, yet so calm and serene that its radicalism had the accents
of the gospel of peace. Here was an iconoclast without a hammer,
who took down our idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it
seemed like an act of worship.”

ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE CONCORD

FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
The Town of Concord, in the year 1782, chose a committee of ten
leading citizens to give instructions to its selectmen. The third of the
seventeen articles proposed by them read thus: “That care be taken
of the Books of Marters and other bookes, and that they be kept from
abusive usage, and not lent to persons more than one month at one
time.” This indicates the root of a town library. A constitution of a
Library Company, dated 1784, is extant. In 1806 a Social Library was
incorporated, which was merged in the Town Library in 1851. The
books were kept in a room in the Town House which was open for
borrowers on Saturdays.
William Munroe, son of a Concord tradesman who vied with the
Thoreaus in the manufacture of lead pencils, after leaving the
Concord schools went into business, and later into the manufacture
of silk. His intelligence and force of character secured prosperity. He
loved Concord, and, to use his own words, “desired to testify my
regard to my native town by doing something to promote the
education and intelligence, and thus the welfare and prosperity of its
people.” He gave to Concord a lot of land in the heart of the town
and a building for a Free Public Library, which, with great care and
thoroughness, he had built thereon and duly furnished; and made
handsome provision for care of the land and the extension of the
building later. He added a generous gift for books of reference and
standard works. The town thankfully accepted the gift, placed their
books in it, and chose their library committee. On a fine autumn day
in 1873, the library was opened with public ceremonies. Mr. Munroe
in a short and modest speech explained his purpose; Mr. H. F. Smith,
on behalf of the new library committee, reported its action and the
gifts which had poured in; Judge Hoar received the property on
behalf of the Board of Corporation, and Mr. Emerson, but lately
returned with improved health from his journey to the Nile, made the
short address. Writing was now very difficult for him, but the
occasion pleased and moved him, and his notes on books and on
Concord, and the remembrance of his friends the Concord authors
but lately gone, served him, and the day passed off well.
Page 498, note 1. The Gospel Covenant, printed in London in
1646, and quoted by Mr. Emerson in the “Historical Discourse.”
Page 499, note 1. Major Simon Willard, a Kentish merchant was
Peter Bulkeley’s strong coadjutor in the founding of Concord. He
also is alluded to in the “Historical Discourse.”
Page 500, note 1. These extracts are from the diary of Miss Mary
Moody Emerson.
Page 500, note 2. This letter was written not long after the death of
John Thoreau, Henry’s dearly loved brother, and also of little Waldo
Emerson, to whom he became greatly attached while he was a
member of Mr. Emerson’s household.
Page 501, note 1. Mr. Emerson here speaks for others. He could
not read Hawthorne because of the gloom of his magic mirror, but
the man interested and attracted him, though even as neighbors they
seldom met.
Page 506, note 1. Mr. Emerson notes that this is an allusion to the
“Harmonies of Ptolemy.”
 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC
In 1863, during the dark days of the Civil War, before the tide had
fully turned in the field, while disaffection showed itself in the North,
and England and France threatened intervention, Mr. Emerson gave
a hopeful lecture, the basis of the present discourse, on the Fortune
of the Republic. After the war it was adapted to the new and happier
conditions. On the 30th of March, 1878, six years after Mr. Emerson
had withdrawn from literary work, and but four years before his
death, he was induced to read the lecture in the Old South Church,
in a course planned by the committee, to save the venerable
building. The church was filled, Mr. Emerson’s delivery was good,
and he seemed to enjoy the occasion. It was probably his last
speech in public, and so fitly closes the volume.
Page 513, note 1. This passage occurred in the early lecture:—
“It is the distinction of man to think, and all the few men who, since
the beginning of the world, have done anything for us were men who
did not follow the river, or ship the cotton, or pack the pork, but who
thought for themselves. What the country wants is personalities,—
grand persons,—to counteract its materialities, for it is the rule of the
universe that corn shall serve man, and not man, corn.”
Page 519, note 1. Here followed: “What we call ‘Kentucky,’ or
‘Vallandigham,’ or ‘Fernando Wood’ is really the ignorance and
nonsense in us, stolid stupidity which gives the strength to those
names.... It is our own vice which takes form, or gives terror with
which these persons affect us.”
Page 520, note 1. This refers to a young Massachusetts scholar,
of promise and beauty, whom Mr. Emerson had been pleased with,
as a fellow voyager. He soon was corrupted by politics. Coming up,
at a reception, to shake hands with Mr. Emerson he was thus
greeted: “If what I hear of your recent action be true, I must shake
hands with you under protest.” Soon after, this aspirant for power
attended the dinner given to Brooks after his cowardly assault on
Sumner; but the moment the Emancipation Proclamation had been
approved by the people, he became an ornamental figurehead at
Republican and reform gatherings.
Page 520, note 2. From the last scene of Cynthia’s Revels, by Ben
Jonson.
Page 521, note 1. “The one serious and formidable thing in Nature
is a will.”—“Fate,” Conduct of Life, p. 30.
See also “Aristocracy,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p.
50.
Page 524, note 1. Ben Jonson, The Golden Age Restored.
Page 526, note 1.

She spawneth men as mallows fresh.

“Nature,” II., Poems.

See also the “Song of Nature,” in the Poems.

Page 526, note 2. In the earlier lecture was this passage:—
“The roots of our success are in our poverty, our Calvinism, our
thrifty habitual industry,—in our snow and east wind, and farm-life
and sea-life....
“There is in this country this immense difference from Europe, that,
whereas all their systems of government and society are historical,
our politics are almost ideal. We wish to treat man as man, without
regard to rank, wealth, race, color, or caste,—simply as human
souls. We lie near to Nature, we are pensioners on Nature, draw on
inexhaustible resources, and we interfere the least possible with
individual freedom.”
Page 527, note 1. In the “Historical Discourse” in this volume, Mr.
Emerson tells of the evolution of the town-meeting of New England
and its working excellence, and of the latter also in “Social Aims” and
“Eloquence,” in Letters and Social Aims.
Page 540, note 1.
For you can teach the lightning speech,
And round the globe your voices reach.

“Boston,” Poems.

Page 541, note 1.

I will divide my goods;

Call in the wretch and slave:
None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.

“Boston Hymn,” Poems.

Page 544, note 1. The following passages came from the earlier
lecture:—
“I must be permitted to read a quotation from De Tocqueville,
whose censure is more valuable, as it comes from one obviously
very partial to the American character and institutions:—
“‘I know no country in which there is so little true independence of
opinion and freedom of discussion as in America’ (vol. i., p. 259).”
“I am far from thinking it late. I don’t despond at all whilst I hear the
verdicts of European juries against us—Renan says this; Arnold
says that. That does not touch us.
“’Tis doubtful whether London, whether Paris can answer the
questions which now rise in the human mind. But the humanity of all
nations is now in the American Union. Europe, England is historical
still. Our politics, our social frame are almost ideal. We have got
suppled into a state of melioration. When I see the emigrants landing
at New York, I say, There they go—to school.
“In estimating nations, potentiality must be considered as well as
power; not what to-day’s actual performance is, but what promise is
in the mind which a crisis will bring out.”
“The war has established a chronic hope, for a chronic despair. It
is not a question whether we shall be a nation, or only a multitude of
people. No, that has been conspicuously decided already; but
whether we shall be the new nation, guide and lawgiver of all
nations, as having clearly chosen and firmly held the simplest and
best rule of political society.
“Culture, be sure, is in some sort the very enemy of nationality and
makes us citizens of the world; and yet it is essential that it should
have the flavor of the soil in which it grew, and combine this with
universal sympathies. Thus in this country are new traits and
distinctions not known to former history. Colonies of an old country,
but in new and commanding conditions. Colonies of a small and
crowded island, but planted on a continent and therefore working it in
small settlements, where each man must count for ten, and is put to
his mettle to come up to the need....
“Pray leave these English to form their opinions. ’Tis a matter of
absolute insignificance what those opinions are. They will fast
enough run to change and retract them on their knees when they
know who you are....
“I turn with pleasure to the good omen in the distinguished
reception given in London to Mr. Beecher. It was already prepared by
the advocacy of Cobden, Bright and Forster, Mill, Newman, Cairnes
and Hughes, and by the intelligent Americans already sent to
England by our Government to communicate with intelligent men in
the English Government and out of it. But Mr. Beecher owed his
welcome to himself. He fought his way to his reward. It is one of the
memorable exhibitions of the force of eloquence,—his evening at
Exeter Hall. The consciousness of power shown in his broad good
sense, in his jocular humor and entire presence of mind, the
surrender of the English audience on recognizing the true master. He
steers the Behemoth, sits astride him, strokes his fur, tickles his ear,
and rides where he will. And I like the well-timed compliment there
paid to our fellow citizen when the stormy audience reminds him to
tell England that Wendell Phillips is the first orator of the world. One
orator had a right to speak of the other,—Byron’s thunderstorm,
where

“‘Jura answers from his misty shroud

Back to the joyous Alps who call to him aloud.’

“The young men in America to-day take little thought of what men
in England are thinking or doing. That is the point which decides the
welfare of a people,—which way does it look? If to any other people,
it is not well with them. If occupied in its own affairs, and thoughts,
and men, with a heat which excludes almost the notice of any other
people,—as the Jews, as the Greeks, as the Persians, as the
Romans, the Arabians, the French, the English, at their best times
have done,—they are sublime; and we know that in this abstraction
they are executing excellent work. Amidst the calamities that war has
brought on our Country, this one benefit has accrued,—that our eyes
are withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, and look
homeward. We have come to feel that

“‘By ourselves our safety must be bought;’

to know the vast resources of the continent; the good will that is in
the people; their conviction of the great moral advantages of
freedom, social equality, education and religious culture, and their
determination to hold these fast, and by these hold fast the Country,
and penetrate every square inch of it with this American civilization....
“Americans—not girded by the iron belt of condition, not taught by
society and institutions to magnify trifles, not victims of technical
logic, but docile to the logic of events; not, like English, worshippers
of fate; with no hereditary upper house, but with legal, popular
assemblies, which constitute a perpetual insurrection, and by making
it perpetual save us from revolutions.”
 FOOTNOTES
[A] Mr. Emerson believed the “not” had been accidentally
omitted, and it can hardly be questioned that he was right in his
supposition.
[B] Vol. ii., pp. 424-433.
[C] The Genius and Character of Emerson; Lectures at the
Concord School of Philosophy, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston:
James R. Osgood & Co., 1885.
[D] Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. i., pp. 260,
261.
[E] Epistle of Paul to Philemon, i. 16, 17.
[F] See the report of this speech in Redpath’s Life of Captain
John Brown. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860.
[G] “Review of Holmes’s Life of Emerson,” North American
Review, February, 1885.
[H] Richard Henry Dana; a Biography. By Charles Francis
Adams. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890. In chapter viii. of this book
is a very remarkable account of John Brown and his family at their
home at North Elba in 1849, when Mr. Dana and a friend, lost in
the Adirondac woods, chanced to come out upon the Brown
clearing and were kindly received and aided.
[I] While waiting for the services to begin, Mr. Sears wrote some
verses. The following lines, which Mrs. Emerson saw him write,
were a prophecy literally fulfilled within three years by the Union
armies singing the John Brown song:—

“But not a pit six feet by two

Can hold a man like thee;
John Brown shall tramp the shaking earth
From Blue Ridge to the sea.”

[J] In the very interesting work The Influence of Emerson,

published in Boston in 1903, by the American Unitarian
Association.
 [K] See note 3 to page 63 of the “Historical Discourse.”
[L] “Emerson’s Relation to Society,” in The Genius and
Character of Emerson, Lectures at the Concord School of
Philosophy, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.,
1885.
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