Brian A Hickam - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Brian A Hickam

Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience, 2016

Metal music studies began in earnest with sociologist Deena Weinstein’s 1991 monograph Heavy Meta... more Metal music studies began in earnest with sociologist Deena Weinstein’s
1991 monograph Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (Weinstein 1991).
Thanks largely to a growing array of scholarly events over the past
decade, metal music studies has become increasingly transdisciplinary.
The scope of metal music studies is anything and everything having to do
with heavy metal music and culture: all topics, regions, eras, relationships, and perspectives. This chapter employs stakeholder theory and systems thinking to analyze metal music history and metal music studies.

Journal For Cultural Research, 2011

From its inception, both outsiders and insiders have associated heavy metal with men and masculin... more From its inception, both outsiders and insiders have associated heavy metal with men and masculinity. Some have even maintained that metal culture is hostile territory for women. Despite this, a significant proportion of writers who have documented, analysed, and indeed celebrated heavy metal has been women, from the groundbreaking sociological studies of Deena Weinstein and Donna Gaines, to the recent ethnographic work of Emma Baulch. This article provides a preliminary investigation of this historical phenomenon and what it can reveal about the ever complex, constantly changing relationship between gender and power in metal.

Metal Music Studies, 2022

This paper corrects the history of the first heavy metal conference (described in my "Amalgamated... more This paper corrects the history of the first heavy metal conference (described in my "Amalgamated Anecdotes" paper. It was a collaboration with music and culture studies colleagues in Florida, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and Guatemala that analyzed scholarly communication, translation studies, and emergent fields of study.

* Toda la sangre formando un río (All blood forming one river) is a line from the poem Son Número 6 by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. The phrase is frequently used on stage by the Cuban metal band Tendencia as a call for unity.

Self-published, 2010

While heavy metal and hardcore punk are currently experiencing renewed popularity, there is conce... more While heavy metal and hardcore punk are currently experiencing renewed popularity, there is concern regarding the preservation of books, magazines/fanzines, and audio & video recordings which cover these genres-primary sources on which today's and future researchers will depend. Even though the metal, punk, and related communities have done excellent jobs of documenting the music and cultures over the past five decades, no library or archive with a mission to create an exhaustive collection of such materials existed before 2008. Heavy metal studies was realizing synergies that year, prompting scholars to act on this crisis. A special collection within the Music Library & Sound Recordings Archive at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, U.S.A.) was commenced with a goal of affording scholars a permanent, openly accessible, exhaustive collocation of research materials. This paper details that endeavor and presents strategies for establishing multilingual archives of heavy music materials in three to five strategic locations around the world. The collections and missions of other relevant repositories are also highlighted.

Journal of American Studies, 2010

Steve Waksman's analysis of the relationship between heavy metal and punk begins in the early 197... more Steve Waksman's analysis of the relationship between heavy metal and punk begins in the early 1970s, an era in which several influential contemporary critics believed that rock music, the prime medium of 1960s countercultural rebellion, was in danger of losing its core audience. By late 1969, US entertainment corporations were beginning to appreciate the enormous commercial potential of rock (as opposed to pop) music and its appeal to an affluent audience of young Americans from the '' Woodstock Generation. '' New forms of rock music, including the '' soft rock '' of reflective ''mature '' artists such as the singer-songwriter James Taylor and the '' country rock '' of artists such as the Eagles and Jackson Browne were beginning to dominate US FM radio airwaves. Reacting to this trend, both heavy metal and early punk were, in Waksman's words, based upon the notion that rock music should be '' visceral rather than reflective, Dionysian rather than Apollonian'' (301). Waksman traces the idea that to a small cabal of music critics, musicians and entrepreneurs, '' authentic '' rock should always remain wild, outrageous, loud and dangerous. These included Detroit-based political activist and MC5 manager John Sinclair ; Terry Knight, manager of the ear-splitting, monolithic heavy rock threepiece Grand Funk Railroad ; the late journalist and rock critic Lester Bangs (author of provocative articles with titles such as '' James Taylor Marked for Death '' (51)); and Lenny Kaye, founder member of the Patti Smith Group and compiler of the seminal 1972 proto-punk/garage rock/psychedelic compilation album Nuggets. Their ideology was based on the belief that the only guarantee for rock to remain a vital and perpetually relevant medium was the demand that it continually adapt to the shifting tastes of teenagers (or in Terry Knight's parlance '' the people '') rather than degenerate into a ''mellow '' impotent dotage. The title of This Ain't the Summer of Love is taken from the opening track of the 1976 album Agents of Fortune by Blue Ö yster Cult, the US proto-metal band critically acclaimed by key members of the contemporary rock cognoscenti for their ironic assault on the platitudes of complacent ex-hippy baby-boomers. The fact that the song's refrain was reechoed almost twenty years later in the track '' Swallow My Pride '' by the seminal Seattle ''grunge '' outfit Green River is seen by Waksman as illustrative of the persistence of the idea that heavy rock music, as demonstrated in a bewildering variety (e.g. arena rock, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, hardcore, grunge, etc.) of generic hybrids, should retain its essentially transgressive sonic power. Employing an iconoclastic and interdisciplinary approach characteristic of much of the best American studies scholarship, Waksman bases his analysis on theoretical approaches to the study of genre, focussing on the ways in which seemingly antagonistic literary and musical genres have been shown to actually encourage one another's survival by providing cross-currents of symbiosis. In the case of heavy metal and punk he focusses on the semiotic rules that helped define both genresincluding the significance of physical performance space, the relative significance of

Metal Music Studies, 2014

Metal music and culture studies has witnessed rapid growth since its first international scholarl... more Metal music and culture studies has witnessed rapid growth since its first international scholarly conference in 2008. Six years later, there are regular conferences and symposia; the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS); a refereed journal; archives of primary sources; a comprehensive bibliography; and robust scholarly communication. This article examines the history, status and future of metal studies. Through interviews with several key players, the story of 'how' and 'why' this new field of study emerged is illustrated. introduction 'Through stories, the complexities of human interactions are portrayed.' (Calvert 2007: 606) For many of us in the metal music and culture studies arena, we have reached the state where the number of dissertations, theses, monographs, journal

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