Porous Communities Critical Interactions Between Metal Music and Local Culture in the Caribbean Context
Book Chapter
Varas-Díaz, N, Mendoza, S, Morales, E. (2016). Porous Communities Critical Interactions Between Metal Music and Local Culture in the Caribbean Context
. 101-124. 10.5040/9781666999310.ch-006
Varas-Díaz, N, Mendoza, S, Morales, E. (2016). Porous Communities Critical Interactions Between Metal Music and Local Culture in the Caribbean Context
. 101-124. 10.5040/9781666999310.ch-006
The scholarly examination of metal music has continued to grow in the past years and researchers involved in the field have further contributed to strengthening an interdisciplinary area of study which addresses a musical genre that was until recently almost systematically ignored in the social sciences (Hickam 2015). This expanding interest in metal continues to yield a plethora of new directions in which scholars have focused their interests and attention. Some of these include metal’s relation to ethnicity (Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2012), race (Dawes 2013), religiosity (Moberg 2012; 2015), gender (Mendoza and Varas-Díaz 2013; Riches, Lashua, and Spracklen 2014), and sexuality (Clifford-Napoleone 2015), to name a few areas of inquiry. One area of study that has also garnered attention has been the process of community building via metal. Although this might seem surprising to outsiders due to existing social prejudices, references to the communal experience are readily apparent in this musical genre. Shared experiences through music, geographical spaces, dress codes (e.g., shirts, battle jackets), dancing styles (e.g., moshing) and common symbols (e.g., hand gestures) are just some of the examples that point toward the importance of a common or shared experience in the process of creating or consuming metal (Snell and Hodgetts 2007)....
