Gerd Bayer
Heavy Metal Music in Britain
(Surrey: Ashgate 2009)
Review by Michelle Phillipov

Heavy metal is one of popular music’s most enduring and commercially successful genres. Emerging in the late 1960s, metal has since undergone numerous transformations, from massive arena spectacles to obscure underground subgenres. Despite its longevity and sustained popularity over the past four decades, metal has enjoyed only limited scholarly attention. It was not until the early 1990s — over 20 years after the genre’s inception — that a significant body of scholarship began to emerge. But even then, the critical literature on metal has remained noticeably less than for other major musical genres and, significantly, it has also remained noticeably less favourable. Metal has been too often dismissed as conservative and reactionary; its apparent substitution of escapism for political commitment has contributed to a dominant stereotype of the genre as less empowering, less culturally significant and less worthy of study than other more straightforwardly ‘progressive’ alternatives. [Read more →]