Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Music
Around the World
Edited by Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene
Duke University Press, 2012
At its title clearly indicates, Metal Rules the Globe aims to explore the heavy
metal music phenomenon frorn an international point of view and present the production
and reception of the metal genre in a variety of geographic and cultural contexts, which
include China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Brazil, Japan, Norway, Malta,
Easter Island, Slovenia, the United States, Canada and Israel. Each essay is welldocumented and highly informative of the state of heavy metal music across the world,
and this is probably the greatest merit of Metal Rules the Globe, for it demonstrates by its
mere existence that serious scholarly attention can be fhiitfully devoted to populär culture
works and genres. Heavy metal music fulfills very definite social and artistic functions
within our increasingly globalized society and although its materializations may vary
according to specific countries and cultures, as shown by the different essays that
compose this collection, it remains a worthwhile corpus of study which deserves further
attention. Metal Rules the Globe is hence an important Step into the re-evaluation of our
academic preoccupations and endeavors.
The collection includes fourteen essays thematically distributed in six chapters:
chapter 1, “The Global Spread of Heavy Metal” presents an overall theory of metal music
globalization; chapter 2, “Metal, Gender, Modemity” introduces and discusses the
notions of gender and masculinity applied to heavy metal in China, Indonesia, Malaysia
and Singapore; chapter 3, “Metal and the Nation” approaches the Nepalese and Brazilian
metal scenes from a sociological point of view, and identifies heavy metal music as a
vector of transgression and empowerment both socially and artistically; chapter 4, “Metal
and extremist ideologies” delves into the political ramifications of heavy metal and its
ambiguous fluid ideological positioning, which includes, in the case of Norwegian black
metal, a retum to Scandinavian mythology; chapter 5 , “Metal in the Music Industry”
presents the transcultural rise and expansion of Occidental heavy metal throughout the
seventies, and its current Status in Japanese culture; and finally chapter 6, “Small
Nation/Small Scene Case Studies” tackles three specific instances of the appropriation
and adaptation of heavy metal music in foreign countries, namely in Slovenia, Malta and
Easter Island, to illustrate the on-going negotiation between globalized modemity and
cultural tradition.
In the first chapter (“The Global Spread of Heavy Metal”), the editors go to
great lengths to theorize the heavy metal phenomenon on a global scale, an
understandable position given the current lack of academic credibility of their subject, but
which, in the end, might prove somewhat counter-productive, for it prompts debatable
generalizations. For instance, on page 13, it is stated that by using heavy distortion and
very high volume, metal music represents “extremes of human expression, gesturing
towards escape, empowerment or transgression.” Whereas this is undeniably true, it is not
however exclusive to metal and could very well apply to other genres such as hard rock
or punk rock; even the Rolling Stones, in the cultural context of the sixties, could be seen