Metal Studies is a genuinely interdisciplinary research field. However, different specialist traditions, differing theoretical and methodological approaches, and also terminological "translation difficulties" make collaboration within the field difficult. This volume aims to explore the potential and limitations of interdisciplinary work by examining an example area - the laws of Heavy Metal - from the point of view of central disciplines. Laws are regarded as social conventions - i.e., rules that are made by human beings and are culturally stable. Examples of laws include conventions of musical language, the dress code in the metal scene, behavioural norms, and conventions in writing song lyrics. The volume includes contributions from the fields of law, social ethics, art history, religious studies, musicology, sociology, linguistics, and cultural history.

This multi-disciplinary book explores the textual analysis of heavy metal lyrics written in languages other than English including Japanese, Yiddish, Latin, Russian, Hungarian, Austrian German, and Norwegian. Topics covered include national and minority identity, politics, wordplay, parody, local/global, intertextuality, and adaptation.

This is a comprehensive, illustrated book about one of the most enduringly popular forms of music. Combining biography, critical analysis, and detailed reference sections, it profiles all the major heavy metal artists as well as a huge selection of other niche acts from around the world. Metal: The Definitive Guide includes new firsthand interviews with many major metal musicians and detailed discographies. It is the definitive metal encyclopedia.The over 300 illustrations in this book encompass fantastic including artist pictures and memorabilia such as posters, ticket stubs, and much more.

Skulls and Siamese. Corpse paint and Persians. Baphomet, pentagrams, blood, and tabbies! Metal Cats combines two amazing subjects: the extreme personalities of the hardcore metal music scene and their adorable kitties. These incredibly cute and fluffy felines have been photographed with their loving owners in and around the dark abodes of musicians, fans, and promoters of metal including members of the bands Black Goat, Thrones, Isis, Lightning Swords of Death, Book of Black Earth, Skarp, Harassor, Akimbo, Aldebaran, Atriarch, Oak, Ghoul, Ludicra, Holy Grail, Xasthur, Cattle Decapitation, Murder Construct, Exhumed, Morbid Angel, Municipal Waste, Skeletonwitch, Gypsyhawk, Nausea, Phobia, and Napalm Death. Metal isn't all dark and disturbing, violent and misanthropic. Metal Cats is proof that while the music may be brutal, the people in the scene are softies for their pets just like you and me... A portion of the proceeds from this book and a series of benefit shows held along the West Coast will go towards one no-kill shelter in each of the four main cities visited.

Black metal is a paradox. A noisy underground metal genre brimming with violence and virulence, it has captured the world’s imagination for its harsh yet flamboyant style and infamous history involving arson, blasphemy, and murder. Today black metal is nothing less than a cultural battleground between those who claim it for nationalist and racist ends, and those who say: Nazi black metal fvck off! Black Metal Rainbows is a radical collection of writers, artists, activists, and visionaries, including Drew Daniel, Kim Kelly, Laina Dawes, Espi Kvlt, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Svein Egil Hatlevik, Eugene S. Robinson, Margaret Killjoy, and many more. Across essays and theory-fictions, artworks and comics, we say out loud: Long live black metal’s trve rainbow! This unique volume envisions black metal as always already open, inclusive, and unlimited: a musical genre whose vital spirit of total antagonism rebels against the forces of political conservatism. Beyond its clichés of grimness, nihilism, reaction, and signature black/white corpse-paint sneer, black metal today is a vibrant and revolutionary paradigm. This book reveals its ludic, carnival worlds animated by spirits of joy and celebration, community and care, queerness and camp, LGBTQI+ identities and antifascist, antiracist, and left-wing politics, not to mention endless aesthetic experimentation and fabulousness. From the crypt to the cloud, Black Metal Rainbows unearths black metal’s sparkling core and illuminates its prismatic spectrum: deep within the black, far beyond grimness, and over a darkly glittering rainbow!

This updated reissue of Mark LeVine’s acclaimed, revolutionary book on sub- and countercultural music in the Middle East brings this groundbreaking portrait of the region’s youth cultures to a new generation. Featuring a new preface by the author in conversation with the band The Kominas about the problematic connections between extreme music and Islam. An eighteen-year-old Moroccan who loves Black Sabbath. A twenty-two-year-old rapper from the Gaza Strip. A young Lebanese singer who quotes Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, and reggae are each the music of protest, and are considered immoral by many in the Muslim world. As the young people and subcultures featured in Mark LeVine’s Heavy Metal Islam so presciently predicted, this music turned out to be the soundtrack of countercultures, uprisings, and even revolutions from Morocco to Pakistan. In Heavy Metal Islam, originally published in 2008, Mark LeVine explores the influence of Western music on the Middle East and North Africa through interviews with musicians and fans, introducing us to young people struggling to reconcile their religion with a passion for music and a thirst for change. The result is a revealing tour de force of contemporary cultures across the Muslim majority world through the region’s evolving music scenes that only a musician, scholar, and activist with LeVine’s unique breadth of experience could narrate. A New York Times Editor’s Pick when it was first published, Heavy Metal Islam is a surprising, wildly entertaining foray into a historically authoritarian region where music reveals itself to be a true democratizing force—and a groundbreaking work of scholarship that pioneered new forms of research in the region.

Elaborating on themes of resilience, memory, critique and metal beyond metal, this volume highlights how the development and future of metal music scholarship is predicated on the engagement with other forms of popular culture such as comics, documentaries, and popular music. Drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture's transnational approach and rootedness in metal scholarship provides the collection with a breadth and depth that makes it a critical resource for academics and students interested in the theories and trends shaping the future of Metal Music Studies.

Law and Outsiders is a collection of 13 essays from leading young scholars covering five important areas of legal scholarship: adjudication, European law and politics, migration, vulnerable minorities and legal values. The recurring theme in the volume is the way in which rules and processes are contributing to the creation of twenty-first-century 'others' in areas such as domestic constitutional systems, international security and migration, and global human rights discourses. The essays are drawn from the second International Graduate Legal Research Conference, held at King's College London in June 2008.

A 17th-century French haberdasher invented the Black Mass. An 18th-century English Cabinet Minister administered the Eucharist to a baboon. High-ranking Catholic authorities in the 19th century believed that Satan appeared in Masonic lodges in the shape of a crocodile and played the piano there. A well-known scientist from the 20th century established a cult of the Antichrist and exploded in a laboratory experiment. Three Italian girls in 2000 sacrificed a nun to the Devil. A Black Metal band honored Satan in Krakow, Poland, in 2004 by exhibiting on stage 120 decapitated sheep heads. Some of these stories, as absurd as they might sound, were real. Others, which might appear to be equally well reported, are false. But even false stories have generated real societal reactions. For the first time, Massimo Introvigne proposes a general social history of Satanism and anti-Satanism, from the French Court of Louis XIV to the Satanic scares of the late 20th century, satanic themes in Black Metal music, the Church of Satan, and beyond.

The only encyclopedic and definitive book on American indie metal! If all you know about metal music was what was heard on commercial radio, then you don’t know metal at all. Heroes of the Underground profiles 600 American bands from every town and city in the United States who ever released a record. Metal bands exploded during the 1980s. Influenced by the heavy sounds coming out of Britain via Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, young guitar shredders turned the amps up and played harder and faster. American record companies scooped up a few bands and signed them to major label recording deals (Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax), but that left hundreds of bands—and their fans—trying to get their songs heard. These intrepid metal bands borrowed a page from punk’s DIY handbook and did it themselves. Regional favorites. Hometown heroes. Tour van veterans. Bands who invested their life savings into recording and pressing their songs onto albums for a shot at immortality on vinyl. Fans remember these bands with joy. Collectors seek these records like the Holy Grail. And in Heroes of the Metal Underground, author Alex Anesiadis compiles the details of these bands and their records. Whether you’re a true or baby metalhead, Heroes of the Metal Underground will become your guide to all things metal.