Dismissed by critics and academics, condemned by parents and politicians, and fervently embraced by legions of fans, heavy metal music continues to attract and embody cultural conflicts that are central to society. In Running with the Devil, Robert Walser explores how and why heavy metal works, both musically and socially, and at the same time uses metal to investigate contemporary formations of identity, community, gender, and power. This edition includes a new foreword by Harris M. Berger contextualizing the work and a new afterword by the author.

During the past three decades, heavy metal music has gone global, becoming a potent source of meaning and identity for devoted fans around the world. In "Metal Rules the Globe," ethnographers and some of the foremost authorities in the burgeoning field of metal studies analyze this dramatic expansion of heavy metal music and culture. They take readers inside metal scenes in Brazil, Canada, Easter Island, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Malta, Nepal, Norway, Singapore, Slovenia, and the United States, describing how the sounds of heavy metal and the meanings that metalheads attribute to them vary from culture to culture. The contributors explore heavy metal fandom in relation to masculinity, race, ethnicity, class, and the music industry, and as a means for disenfranchised youth to negotiate modernity and social change. Their essays reveal metal fans as likely to criticize the consumerism, class divisiveness, and uneven development of globalization as they are to reject traditional norms of behavior. Crucially, the contributors never lose sight of the sense of community and sonic pleasure to be experienced in the distorted, pounding, amplified sounds of local metal scenes.

"Contributors." Idelber Avelar, Albert Bell, Dan Bendrups, Harris M. Berger, Paul D. Greene, Ross Hagen, Sharon Hochhauser, Shuhei Hosokawa, Keith Kahn-Harris, Kei Kawano, Rajko Mursič, Steve Waksman, Jeremy Wallach, Robert Walser, Deena Weinstein, Cynthia P. Wong

The notion of "everyday life" is ubiquitous in the contemporary intellectual scene. While scholars frequently use this concept to signal a romantic return to the "common people," Berger and Del Negro are among the first to subject the term to theoretical scrutiny. This book explores how everyday life has been used in three intellectual traditions (American folklore, British cultural studies and French everyday life theory) and suggests a program for revitalizing anti-elitist approaches to culture.
The book draws on studies of performance from around the globe, including the authors' work on heavy metal in the U.S. and the Italian passeggiata (ritual promenade), to explore the term "identity." Moving beyond truisms that depict performance as a medium for the loss of self or folklore as means of expressing identity, the authors explore the interplay of culture and agency in performance to illuminate the complex dynamics of reflexivity, identity and self. This book will speak to anyone interested in power and aesthetics in performance.

Why does music move us? How do the immediate situation and larger social contexts influence the meanings that people find in stories, rituals, or films? How do people engage with the images and sounds of a performance to make them come alive in sensuous, lived experience? Exploring these questions, Stance presents a major new theory of emotion, style, and meaning for the study of expressive culture. In clear language, the book reveals dimensions of lived experience that everyone is aware of but that scholars rarely account for.
Though music is at the heart of the book, its arguments are illustrated with a wide range of clear examples--from the heavy metal concert to the recital hall, from festivals to dance, stand-up comedy, the movies, and beyond. Helping ethnographers get closer to the experiences of the people with whom they work, this book will be of immediate interest to anyone in ethnomusicology, folklore, popular music studies, anthropology, or performance studies.

Cultural Studies -- Ethnomusicology

Why would a punk band popular only in Indonesia cut songs in no other language than English? If you're rapping in Tanzania and Malawi, where hip hop has a growing audience, what do you rhyme in? Swahili? Chichewa? English? Some combination of these?

"Global Pop, Local Language" examines how performers and audiences from a wide range of cultures deal with the issue of language choice and dialect in popular music.

Related issues confront performers of Latin music in the U.S., drum and bass MCs in Toronto, and rappers, rockers, and traditional folk singers from England and Ireland to France, Germany, Belarus, Nepal, China, New Zealand, Hawaii, and beyond.

For pop musicians, this issue brings up a number of complex questions. Which languages or dialects will best express my ideas? Which will get me a record contract or a bigger audience? What does it mean to sing or listen to music in a colonial language? A foreign language? A regional dialect? A "native" language?

Examining popular music from a range of world cultures, the authors explore these questions and use them to address a number of broader issues, including the globalization of the music industry, the problem of authenticity in popular culture, the politics of identity, multiculturalism, and the emergence of English as a dominant world language. The chapters are written in a highly accessible style by scholars from a variety of fields, including ethnomusicology, popular music studies, anthropology, culture studies, literary studies, folklore, and linguistics.

Harris M. Berger is associate professor of music at Texas A&M University. He is the author of "Metal, Rock and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience" (1999).

Michael Thomas Carroll is professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University. He is the author of "Popular Modernity in America: Experience, Technology, Mythohistory" (2000) and co-editor, with Eddie Tafoya, of "Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture" (2000).

Cultural Studies -- Ethnomusicology

Why would a punk band popular only in Indonesia cut songs in no other language than English? If you're rapping in Tanzania and Malawi, where hip hop has a growing audience, what do you rhyme in? Swahili? Chichewa? English? Some combination of these?

"Global Pop, Local Language" examines how performers and audiences from a wide range of cultures deal with the issue of language choice and dialect in popular music.

Related issues confront performers of Latin music in the U.S., drum and bass MCs in Toronto, and rappers, rockers, and traditional folk singers from England and Ireland to France, Germany, Belarus, Nepal, China, New Zealand, Hawaii, and beyond.

For pop musicians, this issue brings up a number of complex questions. Which languages or dialects will best express my ideas? Which will get me a record contract or a bigger audience? What does it mean to sing or listen to music in a colonial language? A foreign language? A regional dialect? A "native" language?

Examining popular music from a range of world cultures, the authors explore these questions and use them to address a number of broader issues, including the globalization of the music industry, the problem of authenticity in popular culture, the politics of identity, multiculturalism, and the emergence of English as a dominant world language. The chapters are written in a highly accessible style by scholars from a variety of fields, including ethnomusicology, popular music studies, anthropology, culture studies, literary studies, folklore, and linguistics.

Harris M. Berger is associate professor of music at Texas A&M University. He is the author of "Metal, Rock and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience" (1999).

Michael Thomas Carroll is professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University. He is the author of "Popular Modernity in America: Experience, Technology, Mythohistory" (2000) and co-editor, with Eddie Tafoya, of "Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture" (2000).