Heady Metal: Scholars Celebrate a Rock Genre's Cultural Bang
'Metallectuals' Make an Academic Case For Maligned Riffs; The Bon Jovi Debate
By NEIL SHAH
BOWLING GREEN, Ohio—Earlier this month, rock fans around the world descended on this college town, pumped up for four days of music, booze and headbanging.
Kids attending a rock festival? Not exactly. It was the International Conference on Heavy Metal and Popular Culture, the world's biggest gathering of scholars researching the loud, aggressive—and some say obnoxious—music called heavy metal.
For decades, parents, politicians and psychologists have blamed heavy metal for corrupting youth with violent and sexual messages. But a new generation of academics who grew up on groups like Britain's Black Sabbath—widely credited for siring the genre in the early 1970s—is raising metal's black flag in an unlikely place: academia's ivory tower.
These "metallectuals," as they call themselves, congregated at Bowling Green State University clad in black T-shirts with logos of their favorite bands and delivered PowerPoint presentations on topics like "Beyond Black: Satanism, Medievalism and the Dark Illumination of the Self in the Aesthetics of Norwegian and Transnational Black Metal." At night, they conducted field research in Bowling Green's rock clubs while smoking cigarettes and sipping craft beers.
"This is a great day for metal studies, and maybe even for metal," said Jeremy Wallach, 42 years old, an associate professor at BGSU whose research examines how metal is galvanizing youth around the globe the way rock 'n' roll inspired American baby boomers in the 1960s. "To be a metal-head in 2013 is to be part of a global community."
Long considered the domain of stoners and dropouts, heavy metal music has entered the halls of academia. Scholars from around the world recently convened for a cultural summit devoted to the genre. WSJ's Neil Shah reports. Photo: Eva Roca.
Brian Hickam, 42, an archivist of scholarly writings on heavy metal and librarian at Benedictine University in Illinois, says 224 academic papers were published between 2000 and 2011, according to his latest data—more than double the previous 11 years. He says at least 63 scholarly articles were written last year.
The International Society for Metal Music Studies recently launched a peer-reviewed journal, "Metal Music Studies," following a heated debate over what to name it. "You want to distinguish between toxicology and metal, when you're talking about heavy metal studies. People could think—are they studying metals, or music?" Mr. Hickam said.
Once limited to psychological research, metal studies has come to draw on myriad disciplines, from physics, musicology and cultural studies to ethnographic explorations of metal scenes in Puerto Rico, China, Azerbaijan—even Madagascar.
At the conference, musicologists delved into the deep growling of so-called death metal singers, demonstrating the differences between inhaled and exhaled screams, and revealed how some "speed" metal bands secretly use computers to fake their superfast drumming—despite most metal fans' distaste for artifice.
Experts cataloged the widespread use of masks and face paint by bands, and chronicled the history of the heavy-metal concert T-shirt.
"For the first time, I'm talking with my peers," said Dave Snell, a 33-year-old researcher, who received a $80,000 grant from the New Zealand government a few years ago to study "Bogans," New Zealand's hard-partying, metal-loving underclass. "Usually at conferences, it's a room full of suits, and I'm in my Iron Maiden T-shirt," said Dr. Snell, who holds a doctorate in social psychology.
Metallectuals may wear similar uniforms but they have their share of divisive debates: What was the first real metal band? Are "hair" metal groups like Bon Jovi metal or not? Have researchers of "extreme" metal gone too far with their philosophical wanderings?
It isn't easy being a metallectual. Mainstream academics are skeptical. "Professors tell kids, you can study metal, but you will be unemployed," said Gérôme Guibert, an associate professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3 who lectured on France's difficulties producing internationally famous metal bands. In New Zealand, Dr. Snell's research sparked a national controversy after it was lambasted by a member of parliament as a waste of taxpayer money. "The fact that it generated so much discussion shows that Bogans are worth study," Dr. Snell said.
Data on funding for U.S. metal research is hard to come by, but anecdotal reports suggest a combination of public and private university funding and self-funding by researchers themselves.
Metal bands and fans are often equally dismissive, preferring to have their debates on bar stools instead of podiums. Marie Jones, a 43-year-old in the parking lot of BGSU who wasn't attending the conference, was "shocked" to learn that 40-something professors were spending four days talking metal. Ms. Jones likes older bands like Kiss, but said she isn't sure so much time and money should be spent studying them. "There are a lot of people who are hungry," she said.
Still, metallectuals take pride in being misunderstood and marginalized—just like metal musicians and fans. The conference, the first of its kind in the U.S., brought together about 175 scholars, musicians and students from four continents, including Todd Evans, a former member of metal band GWAR, whose albums include "Hell-O" and "America Must Be Destroyed."
"You have to keep that 16-year-old mentality," Mr. Evans told the conference.
Metallectuals are much more cohesive than scholars of punk rock, said Bowling Green's Dr. Wallach, who holds a doctorate in anthropology. "Punks don't play well with each other. They always accuse each other of not being punk enough."
Bowling Green State University, which says it has the only Department of Popular Culture in the nation and the largest popular music archives in an academic library in the U.S., appears poised to become a hub for metal research. The metal conference cost about $10,000, with a significant sum coming from an endowment fund set up by two alumni, Dr. Wallach said.
Ohioans have long had a soft spot for heavy metal, which became more popular when the U.S. Rust Belt lost its manufacturing clout in the 1980s, scholars say. The Buckeye state also houses the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and has issued a stream of rock stars, including members of Warrant, Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, and the Black Keys.
Matt Donahue, a BGSU instructor who has been officially recognized as the metal band Motörhead's biggest North American fan, welcomed conference attendees with a concert by his own group, MAD 45, at Grounds for Thought, a book store and music venue. Among the songs: a 1958 tune called "Rumble" by Link Wray, one of the earliest musicians to use the distorted electric-guitar sound essential to metal. Academics nodded appreciatively and extracted cans of beer from a cooler.
"This one goes out to all the artists, writers, musicians, and teachers—anyone who has had hassles in their lives," Dr. Donahue yelled, strumming his black and white Fender Stratocaster. "This one is about putting your fist in the air."
Write to Neil Shah at neil.shah@dowjones.com
A version of this article appeared April 15, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Heady Metal: Scholars Celebrate A Rock Genre's Cultural Bang.
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