Metal Music and Culture
I have been writing about and researching metal music and culture since I began my PhD in 1996. I am simultaneously a fan, a critic and a sociologist. In this theme page you can find details of my book Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge as well as many other articles I have written on this subject.
Related to this theme is Jews and Metal, which collates my work on this specific area (including the archive of my old blog Metal Jew). Another related theme is Metal Beyond Metal which includes a number of articles I wrote on the future of metal between 2013-2014.
One thing you won’t find on this website at the moment is any of the reviews and articles I wrote between 1997 and 2006 for the metal magazine Terrorizer. The magazine is now defunct and the pieces I wrote were never published online. Infuriatingly I have also lost my cuttings from the magazine too!
Books relating to Metal Music and Culture
First Published: June 4, 2026
First Published: April 29, 2024
Co-edited with Jasmine Hazel Shadrack
Heavy Metal and Disability: Crips, Crowds, and Cacophonies
The relationship between metal and disability is distinctive. Persisting across metal’s sub-genres is a preoccupation with exploring and questioning the boundary that divides the body that has agency from the body that has none. This boundary is one that is familiar to those for whom the agency of the body is an everyday matter of survival.
Metal’s preoccupation with unleashing and controlling sensorial overload acts both as an analogue of neurodiversity and as a space in which those who are neurodivergent find ways to understand and leverage their sensory capacities. Metal offers potent resources for the self-understanding of people with disabilities. It does not necessarily mean that this potential is always explored or that metal scenes are hospitable to those with disabilities. This collection is disability-positive, validating people with disabilities as different but not damaged.
While metal scholars who contribute to this collection see metal as a space of possibility, in which dis/ability and other intersectional identities can be validated and understood, the collection does not imply that the possibilities that metal affords are always actualised. This collection situates itself in a wider struggle to open up metal, challenging its power structures; a struggle in which metal studies has played a significant part.
First Published: April 8, 2016
Co-edited with Andy R. Brown, Karl Spracklen and Niall Scott
Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies
This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wide-ranging focus on bands, scenes, periods, and sounds, contributors explore topics such as the riff-based song writing of classic heavy metal bands and their modern equivalents, and the musical-aesthetics of Grindcore, Doom metal, Death metal, and Progressive metal. They interrogate production technologies, sound engineering, album artwork and band promotion, logos and merchandising, t-shirt and jewellery design, and fan communities that define the global metal music economy and subcultural scene. The volume explores how the new academic discipline of metal studies was formed, also looking forward to the future of metal music and its relationship to metal scholarship and fandom. With an international range of contributors, this volume will appeal to scholars of popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as those interested in metal communities around the world.
First Published: April 1, 2013
Co-edited with Titus Hjelm and Mark LeVine
Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures
Heavy metal is now over forty years old and has developed into a diverse and multi-faceted genre. Wherever it is found and however it is played, metal’s fascination with transgression has often meant it has been embroiled in controversy. Controversies surrounding the alleged connection between heavy metal and, variously, sexual promiscuity, occultism and Satanism, subliminal messages, suicide and violence have made heavy metal a target of moral panics over popular culture. Metal has variously embraced, rejected, played with and tried to ignore this controversy and it remains irrevocably marked by its controversial, transgressive tendencies.
This anthology provides a thorough investigation of how and why metal becomes controversial, how metal ‘scenes’ are formed. It examines the relationship between metal and society, including how fans, musicians and the media create the culture of heavy metal.
A powerful addition to the metal studies literature, this book is overflowing with insights into the cultural politics of heavy metal music. With lively writing, interdisciplinary approaches, and a global perspective, these chapters offer ideas that have broad implications for the study of popular music scenes and their dynamics, media scandals, the relationship between music and affect, and the role of culture in social life
Harris M. Berger, author of 'Metal, Rock and Jazz'
First Published: December 1, 2006
Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge
Extreme metal–one step beyond heavy metal–can appear bizarre or terrifying to the uninitiated. Extreme metal musicians have developed an often impenetrable sound that teeters on the edge of screaming, incomprehensible noise. Extreme metal circulates on the edge of mainstream culture within the confines of an obscure ’scene’, in which members explore dangerous themes such as death, war and the occult, sometimes embracing violence, neo-fascism and Satanism.
In the first book-length study of extreme metal, Keith Kahn-Harris draws on first-hand research to explore the global extreme metal scene. He shows how the scene is a space in which members creatively explore destructive themes, but also a space in which members experience the everyday pleasures of community and friendship.
Including interviews with band members and fans, from countries ranging from the UK and US to Israel and Sweden, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge demonstrates the power and subtlety of an often surprising and misunderstood musical form.
Sharp, engaging, and comprehensive. Extreme Metal is a must-read for metal fans and anyone interested in the study of popular music and subcultural politics in a globalizing age
Sam Dunn, Banger Films
Writings, talks and videos relating to Metal Music and Culture
Black Sabbath with attitude
The New World
Carlos Acosta’s ballet celebrates a band that is woven into Birmingham’s cultural soul
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Confronting & Celebrating the Limits of the Body: Black Sabbath Live at Villa Park
The Quietus
Publication Date: July 9, 2025
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Are Sleep Token Really ‘Metal’?
ArtReview
And given how innovation works in culture today, does it even matter if they are?
Publication Date: June 30, 2025
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Warriors of the Wasteland: How Heavy Metal Survived 1995
The Quietus
30 years on, Keith Kahn-Harris tries to make sense of one of metal's most confusing years and considers what actually makes a genre
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
The Swedish band providing history with heavy metal
The New European
Sabaton’s animated first world war film, To End All Wars, makes for poetic viewing
Publication Date: January 3, 2024
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Metal and the Limits of the Body: Disability as Transgression
Keynote lecture at 'Metal and Transgression: Scenes, Politics, and Religion' Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia 6-7 September 2023
Date: September 6, 2023
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Academic lectures and papers
Love & Disappointment: Peter Gabriel Live
The Quietus
Keith Kahn-Harris is haunted by a childhood humiliation as he experiences the 2023 live version of Pater Gabriel. All photographs by York Tillyer
Publication Date: June 21, 2023
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Personal/Memoire
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
What Are We Rejecting When We Reject St. Anger? Metallica’s Mid-Life Crisis At Twenty
The Quietus
Is it time to re-evaluate Metallica's least-loved album and celebrate it for the extraordinary work that it is? But enough about Lulu. Keith Kahn-Harris wants to talk about St. Anger…
Publication Date: June 5, 2023
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
An Experiment in Musical Comprehension (Co-authored with Ann Morgan)
Riffs
Publication Date: March 2023
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Journal articles, Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Review of ‘To Know The Light’ by Dawn Ray’d
The Quietus
Publication Date: March 27, 2023
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Music reviews
Trapped In The Overground: The Sickness Of The Music Industrialist
The Quietus
Keith Kahn-Harris argues that Ian Winwood’s startling memoire Bodies: Life and Death in Music inadvertently makes the case for the superiority of underground music scenes
Publication Date: May 7, 2022
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Book reviews, Journalism and essays
They Were Not Evil: The Loveable Raconteurs Of NWOBHM
The Quietus
Keith Kahn-Harris reviews Michael Hann’s Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and revisits his long-lost NWOBHM past
Publication Date: February 19, 2022
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Personal/Memoire
Category: Book reviews, Journalism and essays
Taking The Heavy Metal Umlaut Seriously (Or, Why Motörhead Are Azerbaijani)
The Quietus
Riffing on the themes he explores in his new book The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language, Keith Kahn-Harris shares his love of diacritics and explains how the heavy metal umlaut might be less teutonic than it first appears
Publication Date: November 1, 2021
Theme: Best Of, Language, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Heavy Metal als Forschungsobjekt: Spannende Gradwanderung [Interview]
Voxx
Ästhetisch oft interessant, bisweilen jedoch auch sehr problematisch: so beschreibt der britische Soziologe und Musikkritiker Keith Kahn-Harris die versuchte Grenzüberschreitung in den extremen Spielarten des Heavy Metal. Im Gespräch erzählt er, wie man über Metal schreibt – und was in diesem Genre meist nicht zur Sprache kommt.
[A slightly different version of the interview was also published in Jungle World magazine]
Publication Date: October 28, 2021
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Interviews
Gutted, Hashed and Deboned: Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious By Carcass At 30
The Quietus
30 years on, Keith Kahn-Harris still finds this landmark release full of surprises and possibilities
Publication Date: October 25, 2021
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
The Greatness Beyond: How Chaos Rising Are Breaking Metal’s Boundaries
The Quietus
Formed in 2019, the "international all-female metal collective" Chaos Rising have been slowly building up an impressive catalogue of unique collaborative works. Keith Kahn-Harris meets some of the people behind the project and argues that the model it provides has the potential to overturn some of metal’s most enduring institutions
Publication Date: August 3, 2021
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Disenchanted Episode 7
Repeater Radio
With special guest Owen Coggins
Date: June 23, 2021
Theme: Disenchanted, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Podcasts
Disenchanted Episode 6
Repeater Radio
With special guest Ella Kahn-Harris
Date: June 7, 2021
Theme: Disenchanted, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Podcasts
Disenchanted Episode 5
Repeater Radio
Featuring special guest Dan Franklin
Date: May 24, 2021
Theme: Disenchanted, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Podcasts
Metal and Reflexive Anti-Reflexivity
International Society for Metal Music Studies blog
Publication Date: May 17, 2021
Theme: Denial, Ignorance and Stupidity, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Academic articles & reports, Journalism and essays
Disenchanted: Episode 4
Repeater Radio
With special guest Laina Dawes
Date: May 17, 2021
Theme: Disenchanted, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Podcasts
Disenchanted: Episode 3
Repeater Radio
Date: May 10, 2021
Theme: Disenchanted, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Podcasts
Disenchanted: Episode 2
Repeater Radio
Date: May 3, 2021
Theme: Disenchanted, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Podcasts
Disenchanted: Episode 1
Repeater Radio
Date: April 26, 2021
Theme: Disenchanted, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Podcasts
The Raw And The Half-Baked: Sepultura’s Roots At 25
The Quietus
A quarter of a century on from Roots, Keith Kahn-Harris wonders whether Sepultura’s much-vaunted album has actually left much of a legacy
Publication Date: February 15, 2021
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Metal Evolution – Thrash Metal/Metallica
Metal evolution series, episode 6
Date: 2012
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Media appearances and Interviews
Strategic Ignorance and the Threat of Knowledge in the Globalisation of Music
'One Nation Under a Groove – »Nation« als Kategorie populärer Musik.' von Appen, R. and Hindrichs, T. (eds) Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp. 207–228.
Publication Date: November 9, 2020
Theme: Denial, Ignorance and Stupidity, Israel/Palestine, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Book chapters
Breaking the Law: ‘Confess’ by Rob Halford
The Battleground
Publication Date: October 26, 2020
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews
Hope In Extremity: An Interview With Barney Greenway Of Napalm Death
The Quietus
Keith Kahn-Harris chats with legendarily personable Napalm Death vocalist Mark ‘Barney’ Greenway about what extremity and radicalism mean in a plague year
Publication Date: October 20, 2020
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Metal and the Holocaust: Too much transgression?
JewThink
What do you do when you are drawn to the bad guys, but the baddest guys around are just too bad?
Publication Date: October 7, 2020
Theme: Jews and Metal, Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Heavy Metal and Renewal: Rosh Hashanah in the end times
JewThink
How metal’s Christian apocalyptic sensibility can ground hope for a Jewish new year of renewal.
Publication Date: September 21, 2020
Theme: Jews and Metal, Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Engaging with absence: Why is the Holocaust a “problem” for metal?
Metal Music Studies, 6(3), 395–411.
While genocide, killing and transgressive acts of violence are common themes in metal, there is a relative absence of metal lyrics and other ways of engaging with the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews as a theme. This stands in contrast to premodern genocides that are often the subject of fascination. Even when the Holocaust is apparently ‘celebrated’ by neo-Nazi metal acts, some of the specificities of the genocide, together with its applicability to Jews today, may be elided and effaced. When the Holocaust is engaged with in non-neo-Nazi metal lyrics, it is usually with great care and the victims themselves are rarely mentioned. The Holocaust constitutes a ‘problem’ in metal that makes silence and absence a preferable option to engagement. The reasons for this lie in part in metal’s self-conscious avoidance of ‘politics’, the lack of salience of Jews and antisemitism, and the excessive nature of the Holocaust itself.
Publication Date: September 1, 2020
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Jews and Metal, Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
Metal, Jewishness and the Holocaust
Metal Music Studies, 6(3)
Special issue co-edited with Dominic Williams
Publication Date: September 1, 2020
Theme: Jews and Metal, Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Edited issues and publications
Interview with Metal author and scholar, Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris
Metal Rules
Publication Date: April 24, 2020
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Interviews
Heavy by Dan Franklin review – metal gets serious
The Guardian
More than just guitar power chords ... a weighty discussion of metal, for both passionate fans and neophytes
Publication Date: March 11, 2020
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews
Heavy by Dan Franklin review – metal gets serious
The Guardian
More than just guitar power chords ... a weighty discussion of metal, for both passionate fans and neophytes
Publication Date: March 11, 2020
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews
Book Review: Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal by Owen Coggins
Performance, Religion and Spirituality 1(2), 189-195
Publication Date: 2018
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Religion
Category: Book reviews
Black Metal Politics in Taiwan
Souciant
Publication Date: October 18, 2018
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Music reviews
Orphaned Land: the Israeli heavy metal band with fans across the Middle East
New Statesman
The band fuse Jewish and Arab music with heavier sounds, but they can't escape the contraditions at the heart of their homeland.
Publication Date: March 5, 2018
Theme: Israel/Palestine, Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Listening to the devil’s sounds
Boundless
What renders some musical tones and genres illicit, immoral, even diabolical? Keith Kahn-Harris investigates 'dangerous' music
Publication Date: December 2017
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Journalism and essays
What going to a Metallica concert with my daughter taught me about modern infrastructure
Medium
Utopia and dystopia all in one evening
Publication Date: October 26, 2017
Theme: Best Of, Culture, Metal Music and Culture, Personal/Memoire
Category: Journalism and essays
Book Review: Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent by Amber Clifford-Napoleone
Metal Music Studies 3 (3): 474–76
Publication Date: 2017
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews
White power music and the changing face of extremism
New Humanist
Hate rock was a crucial part of previous fascist movements in the US and UK. But today’s populist far-right lacks a soundtrack.
[Essay review of Reichsrock (Rutgers University Press) by Kirsten Dyck and Trendy Fascism (State University of New York Press) by Nancy S Love]
Publication Date: Summer 2017
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Book reviews, Journalism and essays
Excuse all the blood
So Fi Zine
My first attempt at fiction! Based very very loosely on my PhD fieldwork on the Israeli metal scene.
Publication Date: June 24, 2017
Theme: Israel/Palestine, Metal Music and Culture, Miscellaneous, Personal/Memoire
Category: Journalism and essays
Beyond transgression : breaking metal’s boundaries
Keynote at: ‘Boundaries and Ties: The Place of Metal Music in Communities’, University of Victoria
In his address, Dr. Harris attempts to reconsider the nature of metal’s transgression in a digitally abundant age, in which boundaries of the ‘sayable’ and the ‘doable’ are being continually challenged and transformed. His talk aims to question the role transgression plays in metal and its conceptual effectiveness when applying it to studies of metal music and its cultural practices.
Date: June 9, 2017
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Academic lectures and papers
Book Review: Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music by Stephen Graham
Metal Music Studies 3 (2): 353–55
Publication Date: June 1, 2017
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Book reviews
The best books on Heavy Metal recommended by Keith Kahn Harris
Five Books
Metal music, developed in the sixties and seventies, is notorious for its dark and disturbing imagery and its aggressive sound. But there's nothing to be afraid of, says sociologist and fan Keith Kahn-Harris: it's all part of the mythmaking of metal.
Publication Date: January 1, 2017
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews, Interviews
Metal Trump
Souciant
Publication Date: November 25, 2016
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Metal Music and Culture, Politics
Category: Journalism and essays
Do Metal Scenes Need Retirement Homes? Care and the Limitations of Metal Community
In Varas-Díaz, N. and Scott, N. (eds) Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience. Lexington Books, pp. 171–184.
Publication Date: August 1, 2016
Theme: Community, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
“Coming Out”: Realising the Possibilities of Metal
In: 'Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality Interdisciplinary Approaches', edited by Florian Heesch and Niall Scott, Routledge
Publication Date: 2016
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
A Reply to Niall W.R. Scott and Tom O’Boyle
In: Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies, edited by Andy R. Brown, et al London: Routledge
I am grateful to Niall W.R. Scott and Tom O’Boyle for taking my ideas seriously and engaging with their implications. As they recognize, my keynote at the 2013 conference, together with the selection of essays that followed it (Kahn-Harris, 2013; 2014), was intended to be a provocation and a stimulus to debate. While Niall and Tom take issue with some of my arguments, their piece is very much in the spirit of what I was aiming for. In some ways, Niall, Tom, and I are very much on the same page. In the final part of my series of essays, I suggest the concept of ‘Metal beyond Metal’ (Kahn-Harris, 2013g). This refers to taking metalness beyond the confines of what we currently understand as metal. Metalness here connotes the following:
It refers to something that is hard, intractable and resilient. It refers to something that is defiant, inexhaustible and unashamed. To be metal is to be unafraid to explore darkness and transgression, but to do it in such a way that one retains one’s sense of selfhood. To be metal is to possess a certain ebullient wit and playfulness that those outside metal often mistake for crassness. To be metal is to value fellowship, to commit to supporting and celebrating the bonds between like-minded people. (2013g)
I don’t know if Niall and Tom would necessarily sign up to this particular articulation of metalness, but I think we are reaching for the same thing: a future in which metal reaches out simultaneously in myriad different ( Deleuzian) directions at once. I found myself both excited and moved by the passionate way in which they uphold the possibilities of a transgressive and radical metal future. Yet, although I am struck by the similarities between our respective projects, I think there are significant and revealing differences in our relationship to metal today. Niall and Tom point out that my works to which they are responding are ‘not filled with empirical data to support his claims’ but I want to argue that, in fact, my piece is more grounded in an analysis of contemporary metal culture than may at first be apparent.
Publication Date: April 8, 2016
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
The Next Steps in the Evolution of Metal Studies
In Riches, G. et al. (eds) Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture. 1st ed. 2016 edition. New York: Palgrave, pp. 1–18
Publication Date: January 13, 2016
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
Waiting for Lemmy to Die
Souciant
Publication Date: October 19, 2015
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Exploring New Frontiers in the Aesthetics of Metal
University of Southern Denmark, Invited lecture to the Performances of Everyday Living research group
An important theme in metal studies scholarship has been the examination and contestation of ‘capital’ within metal scenes and the hierarchies that derive from them. Gendered, heteronormative and race-based forms of capital in metal have been deconstructed by scholars rooted in metal scenes, forming part of a wider opening-up of metal to previously marginalised groups. While all this is to be welcomed, other forms of subcultural capital circulating in metal scenes have not been subject to the same degree of challenge. Competence, musical skill, innovation and knowledge - amongst other skills - are valorised in metal scenes in ways that create forms of subcultural capital ‘indigenous’ to them. As part of a wider project of rethinking metal aesthetics and metal scenes within the context of what I have termed a ‘crisis of abundance’, I have tried to imagine ways in which metal’s reliance on subcultural capital could be destabilised. In this lecture I will examine how a reconsideration of ‘incompetence’ and ‘mediocrity’ can open up new forms of metal pleasure as well as raising ironies, paradoxes and questions that help us rethink what metal might become in the future.
Date: September 23, 2015
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Other talks (selected)
Landfill Metal: The Ironies of Mediocrity
Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures. Helsinki: Aalto University.
This paper continues my previous explorations into how metal aesthetics and scene-making might be rethought in the face of what I have called a ‘crisis of abundance’ in metal. Drawing on my own attempts to understand a particular metal text – Morgul’s Lost in Shadows Grey (1997) – I explore the nature of ‘mediocrity’ in metal. The paper develops a typology of mediocrity and applies it to the case of metal. Building on this, I discuss how mediocrity might be valorized as a source of aesthetic pleasure. In doing so, a number of ironic or paradoxical elements of mediocrity are highlighted
Publication Date: July 1, 2015
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
From Extreme Metal to Islamic State
Souciant
Publication Date: March 17, 2015
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Metal Music and Culture, Politics
Category: Journalism and essays
The Challenge of Mediocre Metal
Souciant
Publication Date: February 12, 2015
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Metal Evolution – Extreme Metal
Metal Evolution series
Includes interview.
Date: 2015
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Media appearances and Interviews
Interview with All About The Rock Podcast
All About The Rock
Date: 2015
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Podcasts
My Top Ten Musical Anxieties of 2014
Souciant
Publication Date: December 16, 2014
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music, Personal/Memoire
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Series: Metal Beyond Metal
Souciant
A series of posts from 2013 to 2014 in which I outline what 'Metal Beyond Metal' could look like.
Publication Date: January 17, 2014
Theme: Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Faster for the master
New Humanist
More than 30 years after it started, is Christian metal still a thriving underground scene or a decaying corpse? Keith Kahn-Harris goes looking for signs of life amongst the devout undead
Publication Date: May 24, 2013
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Religion
Category: Journalism and essays
Metal Beyond Metal: What Happens Next?
Keynote paper presented at the 'Heavy Metal and Popular Culture' conference, April 4-7 2013, Bowling Green University
Publication Date: April 5, 2013
Theme: Metal Beyond Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Conference papers and lectures
Why Ai Weiwei and heavy metal are a perfect match
The Guardian
Oppressive regimes such as China hate metal for its transgressive freedom; a metal-influenced album is a wise move
Publication Date: March 11, 2013
Theme: Culture, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Metal Multiculturalism
Souciant
Review of What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal by Laina Dawes
Publication Date: December 5, 2012
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews, Journalism and essays
Slayer and me
Souciant
Publication Date: June 14, 2012
Theme: Best Of, Metal Music and Culture, Personal/Memoire
Category: Journalism and essays
Heavy Metal Sheep
Publication Date: September 22, 2011
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Metal Studies? Cultural Research in the Heavy Metal Scene
Journal for Cultural Research 15(3)
Special issue co-edited with Karl Spracklen and Andy R. Brown. Includes jointly authored introduction.
Publication Date: August 30, 2011
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Edited issues and publications
Metal Studies: Intellectual Fragmentation or Organic Intellectualism?
Journal for Cultural Research 15(3) 251-254
Publication Date: August 30, 2011
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
Top Ten Metal Hybrids
Souciant
Publication Date: June 30, 2011
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Yiddish-Speaking Vikings
Souciant
Publication Date: April 20, 2011
Theme: Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Botswana’s Cowboy Metalheads
Vice
Words for photo story on Botswanan metalheads
Publication Date: March 31, 2011
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Black Metal for Leftists
Souciant
Publication Date: March 22, 2011
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
How Diverse Should Metal Be? The Case of Jewish Metal, Overt and Covert Jewishness
In: Scott, N. W. R. and Von Helden, I. (eds) The Metal Void: First Gatherings. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 110–119.
Publication Date: November 1, 2010
Theme: Jews and Metal, Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
Book Review: Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music by Andrew L. Cope
Popular Musicology Online
Publication Date: 2010
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews
‘A Tango Between God and Satan’
The Forward
Article on Israeli metal band Orphaned Land, featuring interview with vocalist Kobi Farhi
Publication Date: January 27, 2010
Theme: Israel/Palestine, Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays
Review: Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War By Jonathan Pieslak
Times Higher Education
Publication Date: November 19, 2009
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Book reviews
Journey into the Known
‘Beneath the Remains – Translations of Estrangement and the Politics of Survival’ at arttransponder, Berlin
The link is to an updated audio-visual essay, from 2015, of my original presentation at this event.
Publication Date: November 9, 2009
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Personal/Memoire
Category: Journalism and essays
Interview: Keith Kahn-Harris aka Metal Jew
Esoterriic
Publication Date: August 6, 2009
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Interviews
International Day of Slayer asks the Experts: is this a good idea?
International Day of Slayer Official Website
Through the wonders of the internet, we were able to assemble a virtual panel of metal experts. This means we asked them the same questions at different times, and we've put it together to make it look like we were all partying in Hollywood together. This is probably the greatest brain trust of metal minds in academia -- true experts -- ever assembled, and they wanted to talk about Slayer.
Publication Date: June 2, 2009
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Interviews
Hipster Metal for Hipster Jews: Jamie Saft’s Black Shabbis
Zeek
Publication Date: March 17, 2009
Theme: Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journalism and essays, Music reviews
Review: Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. By Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan
Times Higher Education
Publication Date: January 29, 2009
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Book reviews
In praise of part-time musicians
The Guardian
Publication Date: December 19, 2008
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Journalism and essays
End of the World Music: Is Extreme Metal the Sound of the Apocalypse?
In: 'The End All Around US: Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture', ed. John Wallis and Kenneth G.C. Newport (London: Equinox). 22-42
Publication Date: October 1, 2008
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
Of corn kernels and Columbine
Times Higher Education
Review of Great Satan's Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism, by Scott Wilson
Publication Date: July 24, 2008
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Book reviews
Review: True Norwegian Black Metal by Peter Beste
New Humanist
Publication Date: July 8, 2008
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews
Exploring Scenes
In: Talkie Walkie: [jongerensubculture] 4 believers/non-believers, Acco, 2007 pp94-105.
Publication Date: December 12, 2007
Theme: Culture, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
The Harsh Noise of Deep Thinking
Times Higher Education
Review of: Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery, Edited by William Irwin
Publication Date: June 29, 2007
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book reviews
Interview: Capital and Punishment
Terrorizer issue 157
Who holds the power in the extreme metal scene? Why does extreme metal produce so many contradictions and how can such a radical artform retain such earthiness? Jonathan Selzer got the answers to these questions and more from Keith Kahn-Harris, author of the far-reaching examination of the metal scene, 'Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge'
Publication Date: May 1, 2007
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Interviews
Interview with John Safran
Sunday Night Safran, Triple J radio (Australia)
Date: February 18, 2007
Theme: Metal Music and Culture, Music, Religion
Category: Media appearances and Interviews
Études Metal: Metal Studies: Une Bibliographe (Co-authored with Fabien Hein)
Volume! 5(2) 19-32
This first attempt at a metal studies bibliography has long ago been superseded by subsequent publications!
Publication Date: May 1, 2006
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
Unspectacular Subculture?: Transgression and Mundanity in the Global Extreme Metal Scene
After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. Edited by Andrew Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris, London: Palgrave, 2004, 107-118
See also Hungarian translation: ‘Nem látványos szubkultúra? Határátlépés és hétköznapiság a globális extrém metal színtéren’ in Replika 19: 65, pp165–175, December 2009
Publication Date: May 5, 2004
Theme: Community, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
The ‘Failure’ of Youth Culture: Music, Politics and Reflexivity in the Black Metal Scene
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1), 95-111
This article examines an enduring question raised by subcultural studies: how youth culture can be challenging and transgressive, yet ‘fail’ to produce wider social change. This question is addressed through a case study of the black metal music scene. The black metal scene flirts with violent racism, yet has resisted embracing outright fascism. The article argues that this is due to the way in which music is ‘reflexively antireflexively’ constructed as a depoliticizing category. It is argued that an investigation of such forms of reflexivity might explain the enduring ‘failure’ of youth cultures to change more than their immediate surroundings.
Publication Date: February 1, 2004
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
The Aesthetics of Hate Music
Commissioned for the ‘Anti-semitism and xenophobia today’ website (no longer live)
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
Theme: Antisemitism, Racism, Hate, Metal Music and Culture, Music
Category: Journalism and essays
Death Metal and the Limits of Musical Expression
In Cloonan, M and Garofalo, R (ed), Policing Popular Music, Temple University Press, pp 81-99
Publication Date: January 1, 2003
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
“I hate this fucking country”: Dealing with the Global and the Local in the Israeli Extreme Metal Scene
Critical Studies Volume 19: Music, Popular Culture, Identities, 133-151
Publication Date: January 1, 2002
Theme: Israel/Palestine, Jews and Metal, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
Transgression and Mundanity: The Global Extreme Metal Music Scene
PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Metal musical genres have challenged conventional notions of ‘music’ by developing an impenetrable sound that verges on formless noise. Extreme Metal music is produced, disseminated and consumed by musicians and fans who shun publicity within a set of obscure institutions that ensure the music’s global ‘underground’ circulation. Within the confines of obscurity, musicians and fans explore in a highly ‘transgressive’ manner such themes as death, war and the occult, sometimes flirting with neo-fascist and racist discourses.
This thesis develops the concept of ‘scene’ as a method of investigating Extreme Metal music and practice. The concept is theorised through an engagement with a wide variety of literatures, notably subcultural theory, theories of community and critical theories of space. The concept is developed so as to provide an ‘holistic’ method of drawing on a wide variety of incommensurate literatures and conceptual frameworks.
Through the concept of scene, this thesis examines how the Extreme Metal scene is ‘experienced’ by its members. Detailed ethnographic, interview and other data are presented from case studies in Israel, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It is argued that scene members explore transgressive experiences that constantly threaten to exceed the confines of the scene. Yet the scene is also a ‘safe’ space, within which members experience the communal pleasures of ‘mundanity’. Members orient their practices so as to experience the pleasures of both transgression and mundanity. They manage the resulting tensions by the practice of ‘reflexive anti-reflexivity’ – the wilful refusal by members to explore the contradictory consequences of their practices. Reflexive anti-reflexivity also ensures that scene members never attend to power relations within the scene, leading to the marginalisation of women and those from certain ethnic backgrounds. The thesis concludes with some reflections about the problematic role of the Extreme Metal and other music scenes in providing means of experiential ‘survival’ within a fraught modernity.
Publication Date: January 2001
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Academic articles & reports
‘Roots’?: The Relationship Between the Global and the Local Within the Global Extreme Metal Scene [published under the author name Keith Harris]
Popular Music 19(1),13-30
Music's ‘malleability’ (Taylor 1997) has always facilitated its export and import from one location to another. Indeed, such processes are central to the creation and dissemination of new musical forms. Yet in our contemporary globalised world, such processes occur ever more extensively and rapidly giving rise to new forms of appropriation and syncretism. Record companies from the developed world find new audiences in the developing world (Laing 1986). Musicians from the West appropriate non-Western music, sometimes collaboratively (Feld 1994; Taylor 1997). Non-Western musicians and musicians from subaltern groups within the West create new syncretic forms drawing on both Western and non-Western music (Mitchell 1996; Lipsitz 1994, Slobin 1993). The resulting ‘global ecumene’ produces considerable ‘cultural disorder’ (Featherstone 1990, p. 6) whose results cannot easily be summarised.
An edited version of this paper also appeared in A. Bennett, B. Shank and J. Toynbee (eds) The Popular Music Studies Reader, Routledge, 2005 pp128-136
Publication Date: January 1, 2000
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Journal articles
An Orphaned Land?: Israel and the Global Extreme Metal Scene
New Voices in Jewish Thought Volume 2, 1-21
German translation: ‘Ein Verwaistes Land? Israel und die Extreme Metal-Szene’ in Testcard 9, 2001
Publication Date: November 1, 1999
Theme: Israel/Palestine, Jews and Metal, Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, Metal Music and Culture
Category: Book chapters
Music is My Life?: Discourse Analysis and the Interview Talk of Members of a Music-Based Subculture
Goldsmiths Sociology Papers, Goldsmiths College, London
Publication Date: June 1, 1997
Theme: Metal Music and Culture
Category: Academic articles & reports