Running with the Devil. Robert Walser

to heavy metal, it is probably due in part to the genre’s history. For heavy metal began as a white remake of urban blues that often ripped off black artists and their songs shamelessly. If the motive for much white music making has been the imperative of reproducing black culture without the black people in it, no comparable reason exists to draw black musicians and fans into traditionally white genres. Heavy metal has remained a white-dominated discourse, apparently offering little to those who have been comfortable with African-American musical traditions. Moreover, it has been transformed into something quite different from its blues origins. Metal’s relatively rigid sense of the body and concern with dominance reflect European-American transformation of African-American musical materials and cultural values. At the end of the 1980s, though, musical interactions among metal, rap, rock, and funk became increasingly popular, perhaps presaging at least a partial breakdown of the racial lines that often separate music audiences (hip hop has already accomplished this to a considerable extent).

      To begin assembling some information about metal fans and to make contacts for later interviews, I distributed questionnaires to fans at several concerts and through a record store.⁵¹ The fans I surveyed ranged in age from eleven to thirty-one years, with an average age of nineteen. This reflects the specific demographics of concert audiences, rather than magazine readers or record buyers, for example; a survey done in 1984 found that two thirds of heavy metal fans were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four; one fifth were under fifteen.⁵² My sample, like the actual crowds I saw, was almost evenly balanced in gender. Their occupations ranged from car wash attendant to law school student, from computer programmer to construction worker. Their parents’ occupations covered the whole gamut of working- and middle-class jobs, with the exception of one sample, collected in a bar in Detroit, which was entirely industrial working class.

      The questionnaire began with items intended to pique the curiosity of the fans, such as queries about how long they have listened to heavy metal and how many hours each day, on the average, they hear metal. Further questions concerned subcultural activities, such as watching MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball” or reading fan magazines. Eventually, I asked more personal questions about age, occupation, gender, and parents’ occupations. At the very end of the form, most fans indicated that they were willing to be interviewed and provided their names and phone numbers.

      I am making no claims for the statistical precision of my sample—I used it as a source of guidance and contacts with fans—but I will summarize the responses I found clear and useful. Nearly all of the fans said that most of their friends were also metal fans, an indication of the centrality of heavy metal to fans’ social lives. More listen to metal from recordings than from radio programming, confirming the importance of the fan activities of owning, collecting, and being knowledgeable about the music (and the paucity of metal programming on the radio). Nearly all fans sing along with heavy metal lyrics, suggesting that, however unintelligible they may sound to outsiders, lyrics are comprehended by fans. Although this contradicts some academic studies, it agrees with Iron Maiden guitarist Steve Harris’s observation that in the United States, “about 90% of the fans know the words to every song.”⁵³

      There were substantial differences among the audiences I surveyed. Compared to the fans at a Poison concert, for example, Judas Priest fans were somewhat older and more likely to be male. While quite a few of the Poison crowd indicated that they play musical instruments, a clear majority of the Judas Priest sample played instruments and owned musical equipment. The Poison fans called “Top 40” their second favorite style of music, while Priest’s fans chose classical music as the runner-up to metal. One section of the questionnaire (which many fans told me was their favorite part) invited fans to indicate whether or not they considered various bands to be “heavy metal.” Judas Priest fans clustered around other hard metal bands, like Iron Maiden and Metallica, while Poison’s fans extended the genre label to Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe as well.

      There was much overall agreement about why heavy metal was important. To avoid asking fans to compose brief explanations of complex feelings at the drop of a hat, I developed a list of plausible statements about metal from my study of fans, magazines, and music. I included a wide range of possibilities, including some that were mutually contradictory; fans were asked to check those with which they most agreed:

      ______It’s the most: powerful kind of music; it makes me feel powerful.

      ______It’s intense; it helps me work off my frustrations.

      ______The guitar solos are amazing; it takes a great musician to play metal.

      ______I can relate to the lyrics.

      ______It’s music for people like me; I fit in with a heavy metal crowd.

      ______It’s pissed-off music, and I’m pissed off.

      ______It deals with things nobody else will talk about.

      ______It’s imaginative music; I would never have thought of some of those things.

      ______It’s true to life; it’s music about real important issues.

      ______It’s not true to life; it’s fantasy, better than life.

      There was solid concurrence that the intensity and power of the music, its impressive guitar solos, the relevance of its lyrics, and its truth value were crucial. Surprisingly, fans overwhelmingly rejected the categories of the pissed-off and the fantastic. The most common grounds for dismissal of heavy metal—that it embodies nothing more than adolescent rebellion and escapism—were the qualities least often chosen by fans as representative of their feelings.⁵⁴ Megadeth’s video for “Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying?” makes this point explicitly. A young headbanger is watching metal videos when his father interrupts: “What is this garbage you’re watching? I want to watch the news.” The dad brusquely changes the channel but his son switches it back, explaining: “This is the news.”

      While the responses to my questionnaire cannot be taken as transparent explanations of heavy metal’s social functions, they are revealing of the ways in which fans make sense of their own responses, as are the collective understandings developed by fans through their involvement with magazines, friendships, and fan clubs. Besides the separate fan clubs surrounding each band (which are usually not clubs as much as marketing lists) there exist social clubs for particular groups of metal fans, from the Gay Metal Society in Chicago to the Headbanger Special Interest Group of American Mensa. Clubs usually publish their own newsletters (GMA puts out The Headbanger, and the Mensa group calls theirs Vox Metallum); they also sponsor social events and promote discussion of metal and related issues. Such internal analyses of heavy metal culture contrast sharply with most discussions by outsiders.

“Nasty, Brutish, and Short”? Rock Critics and Academics Evaluate Metal

      Heavy metal: pimply, prole, putrid, unchic, unsophisticated, antiintellectual (but impossibly pretentious), dismal, abysmal, terrible, horrible, and stupid music, barely music at all… music made by slack-jawed, alpaca-haired, bulbous-inseamed imbeciles in jackboots and leather and chrome for slack-jawed, alpaca-haired, downy-mustachioed imbeciles in cheap, too-large T-shirts with pictures of comic-book Armageddon ironed on the front…. Heavy metal, mon amour, where do I start? —Robert Duncan⁵⁵

      Heavy metal has rarely been taken seriously, either as music or as cultural activity of any complexity or importance. At best it is controversial; the enthusiasm of metal fan magazines is paralleled by the hysterical denunciation of the mainstream press and smug dismissals of most rock journalism. And like country music, metal is a genre that rarely inspires uncertainty in its critics; though few commentators lay claim to much knowledge or understanding of the music or its fans, such ignorance is seldom allowed to hinder confident judgment of both as simple and brutal. Even critics and academics who are scrupulous in distinguishing among the details of other genres display unabashed prejudice when it comes to heavy metal.

      For example, the only reference to metal in a recent book on the rock music industry is this casual summation: “Today’s ‘hot’ rock is heavy metal, this generation’s disco, an apolitical sound more concerned with the conquest of women than the triumph of the