Persistence and Resistance: Examining the White Racial Frame in Metal Music

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine how systemic racism and white supremacy have shaped the metal scene in the Western World, the ways in which the scene’s white racial frame is maintained, and how scene members are challenging this racial hierarchy. One of the main aims of this dissertation is to bring to the fore the diverse range of political and racial ideologies present in the metal scene. To gain insights into how the metal scene has served as an incubator for neo-Nazism and other white supremacist causes for over thirty years, I designed this project to analyze both the overt and covert ways in which white supremacy affects the metal scene. Chapter One is a case study of one of the most influential metal musicians of all time, Phil Anselmo, whose white supremacist behaviors and rhetoric and simultaneous, continuous popularity and success provide ample evidence of how the metal scene’s white racial frame is constructed and maintained. Chapters Two and Three investigate the metal scene’s opposing and diverse political orientations, drawing mostly on historical and current discourses and events tied to black metal, an extreme metal subgenre with deep-rooted ties to neo-Nazism. I compare the artistic aesthetics and non-musical communicative acts of certain far right and anti-fascist black metal bands to illustrate the ways in which overt and covert white supremacy operate and how some artists are subverting the aesthetic conventions of black metal to contest the scene’s white racial frame. I also discuss the extramusical anti-fascist activism by members of the scene, shining a spotlight on the work of the international Antifascist Black Metal Network, which formed in 2021. This dissertation is grounded in an interdisciplinary approach to research. In addition to drawing on frameworks from multiple fields in combination with musicology, such as semiotic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, I incorporate methodologies from both historical musicology and ethnomusicology. I conducted semi-structured interviews with six individuals, participant observation at live musical performances, virtual fieldwork, and digital archival work. Most of my research is qualitative, but in Chapter Two I rely, in part, on a quantitative approach to gather evidence to support my argument that there are many more white supremacist metal bands than the average person in the scene realizes. My research findings demonstrate that the growing far-right faction within the metal scene do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, I argue that overt manifestations of white supremacy are but one effect of the metal scene’s white racial frame. By drawing attention to the less visible and unrecognized manifestations of white supremacist ideologies, my work emphasizes the significant effects of white supremacy still inherent to the scene today, adding to and expanding the ways in which those who study and participate in this genre think about and discuss these important issues.