Full Description
Defining 'Australian metal' is a challenge for scene members and researchers alike. Australian metal has long been situated in a complex relationship between local and global trends, where the geographic distance between Australia and metal music's seemingly traditional centres in the United States and United Kingdom have meant that metal in Australia has been isolated from international scenes. While numerous metal scenes exist throughout the country, 'Australian metal' itself, as a style, as a sound, and as a signifier, is a term which cannot be easily defined.
This book considers the multiple ways in which 'Australianness' has been experienced, imagined, and contested throughout historical periods, within particular subgenres, and across localised metal scenes. In doing so, the collection not only explores what can be meant by Australian metal, but what can be meant by 'Australian' more generally. With chapters from researchers and practitioners across Australia, each chapter maps the distinct ways in which 'Australianness' has been grappled with in the identities, scenes, and cultures of heavy metal in the country. Authors address the question of whether there is anything particularly 'Australian' about Australian metal music, finding that often the 'Australianness' of Australian metal is articulated through wider, mythologised archetypes of national identity. However, this collection also reveals how Australianness can manifest in metal in ways that can challenge stereotypical imaginings of national identity, and assert new modes of being metal 'downungerground'.
Contents
Critical Introduction: What is 'Australian' about Australian Heavy Metal?; Catherine Hoad
PART I: Australian Metal Identities: Masculine Genealogies and Trajectories
Chapter 1. Heavy Metal Kids: A Historiographical Exploration of Australian Proto-heavy Metal in the 1960s-70s; Paul 'Nazz' Oldham
Chapter 2. 'A Blaze in the Northern Suburbs': Australian Extreme Metal's Larrikinish Lineage; Sam Vallen
Chapter 3. 'We're Just Normal Dudes': Hegemonic Masculinity, Australian Identity, and Parkway Drive; Samuel Whiting, Paige Klimentou, and Ian Rogers
PART II: Australian Metal Scenes in the East and West
Chapter 4. 'I Think Sydney's Pretty Shit': Melbourne Grindcore Fans and Their Others; Rosemary Overell
Chapter 5. Frontierswomen and the Perth Scene: Female Metal Musicians on the 'Western Front' and the Construction of the Gothic Sublime; Laura Glitsos
PART III: Cultures of Resistance in Australian Metal
Chapter 6. Creeping Sharia: An Extreme Response to Islamophobia; Can Yalcinkaya and Safdar Ahmed
Chapter 7. 'This is the Funeral of the Earth': The 'Dead-end' Environmental Discourses of Australian Ecometal; Ian Collinson
Afterword. Being Metal, Being Australian? Reflections and an Afterword; Karl Spracklen
Appendix A. Seminal Australian Metal Albums: A List by the Contributors
