Heavy Metal And Gender Essays - Heavy Metal Subgenres,

Heavy Metal And Gender Name: Milad Surname: Rafiei Year/Major: 3rd Year. Film, TV, and Media Studies. Question: Choose one popular music genre and analyze with respect to race, gender OR class. Analysis Of Heavy Metal With Respect To Gender. Heavy Metal music usually include impressive technical feats on the electric guitar, counter posed with an experience of power and control that is built up through vocal, guitar power chords, distortion, and sheer volume of drums. Also Visually, metal musicians typically appear as males, leaping about the stage, leather clothing punctuating their performances with phallic thrusts of guitars and microphone stands. Heavy metal is, a discourse shaped by patriarchy. Circulating in context of Western society, for much of its history metal has been appreciated and supported primarily by a male teenage audience. This is a group lacking in social, physical, and economical power but besieged by cultural messages promoting such forms of power, insisting on them as masculinity. The purpose of a genre is to reproduce a particular ideology, and the aim of heavy metal until mid 1980s was for young white male performers and fans to hear and believe in certain stories about the nature of masculinity. However these representations can never be definitive and they are always open to transformation and changing figures. Since social circumstances may change so that particular forms of culture are no longer related to an individual. For example metal fans as they get older may gain some amount of economical power, or they may find children who replace them at the bottom of social or physical power. Also we have seen a great increase in number female fans, since around 1987, concert audiences for metal shows have been roughly gender balanced . In my discussion I will try to explain why metal has been dominated by male musicians and fans, also why there was a big increase in the number of female fans. I will be framing heavy metal songs and videos in terms of strategies concerning gender and power. Until the mid 1980s, one of these three strategies misogyny, exscription , and androgyny dominated heavy metal music . However another approach in recent years did soften metal with songs about romance, this kind of music particularly has drawn female attention to heavy metal. I will explain these in more details, this type of analysis may tell us about gender construction in heavy metal genre or culture. I have to mention that it is not only lyrics or visual imagery but also the music itself that construct gender experiences. Such signification mentioned above reflects in social contexts such as gender, class, and race. Hence musical meanings are inseparable from these fundamental social concepts. Sorry No Chicks (Exscription): The most distinctive feature of metal videos is that they typically present it as of a live performance. However bands are different in styles as Guns'n'Roses, and Metallica, they all rely on live footage. The video in a concert setting, presents the group in all their glory, as larger than life figures whose presence is validated by feelings of community and power, and evoked by venue and music. These types of footage offer a fantasy world of action, one in which male bonding among members of the hero team is very important. It is worth mentioning that even in nonperformance metal video, narrative is set on a stage concerning male world without women. A good example would be Judas Priest's ?Heading To The Highway? which shows band's guitar players drag race, flagged by the lead singer. The point is the same, to represent and reproduce spectacles that depend for their appeal on exscription of women . The seductive women who sometimes intrude into the video points out several things. First to trigger desire and its appeal to the male gaze and more importantly its threat to masculine control. Male As Victims (Misogyny): Heavy Metal has developed a discourse of male victimization and androgyny; its power to reproduce or adapt patriarchy is often contingent on the absence of overt violence . Women are hinted as mysterious and dangerous; they are dangerous just by being there, their attractiveness threatens to disrupt both male self-control and male bonding. However female fans are invited to identify themselves with the powerful position that is has been made