Resistance Through Music: Exploring the Role of Class Fraction Appropriations and Alliances in the Subcultural Formation of Heavy Metal, Classic, Post and Present

The Birmingham CCCS model of subcultural formation theorised subcultures as ‘coded’ forms of resistance to class subjugation that could only be staged by a working-class youth fraction, since the style and its shared meanings emerge from ‘acts’ of appropriation, bricolage and homology, that transform commercial commodities into a group ‘look’ and shared identity. According to this model, while music genres may accompany the meaning-making of subcultural formations, they cannot be their source. It was this impasse I sought to challenge in my (now seminal) critique (2003) that the CCCS dismissal of heavy metal was a paradigmatic failure to recognise the cross-class bricolage of music and style that made the youth culture possible—despite the evidence of such class-fractional formations and stylistic-appropriations in the work of Cohen (1997/1972, Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community. In K. Gelder & S. Thornton (Eds.), The Subcultures Reader (pp. 90–99). Routledge) and Willis (2014/1978, Profane Culture. Princeton University Press)—as well as the role of ‘subcultural markets’ in developing rather than ‘incorporating’ subcultural styles and group identities. But this work was a contrary part of the post-Birmingham, post-subcultural, postmodernist celebration of ‘neo-tribes’ and ‘club cultures’, which went on to dominate youth-cultural studies. And then came Scene studies, some of which brought metal, class and class-fraction analysis back into the methodology. But contemporary global-local scenes, although they might be described as subcultural, are not defined by class-based identities but as forms of resistance to the dominating logic(s) of global capitalism, experienced for the most part by lower middle-class youth, in new kinds of technical/digital jobs, especially in the Global South (Brown, 2016, Un(su) Stained Class?: Figuring Out the Identity-Politics of Metal’s Class Demographics. In A. R. Brown, K. Spracklen, K. Kahn-Harris, & N. W. R. Scott (Eds.), Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies (pp. 190–206). Routledge). Hall and Jefferson’s (2006/1976). Once More Around Resistance Through Rituals. In S. Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds.), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (2nd ed., pp. vi–xxxvi). Hutchinson) ‘Once More Around Resistance Through Rituals’, acknowledges such ethnographic work as a justified counter to their overly theoretical model. But they question to what extent such studies are able to make connections to the economic and political framing of their respective times, which returns them to the RTR problématique: how do structurally subordinate groups live both their ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ relations to economic and political domination, via subcultures? Seeking an answer to this question leads me back to the Black Sabbath song ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ (1970) that ‘encodes’ the fact that the working-class band were frequently attacked by skinheads, by transforming the encounter into a drugged, mystical scenario of boot-wearing fairies dancing in the night-garden with dwarves. Once decoded, we can see that both youth groups are ‘imagining’ a mode of ‘resistance’, the skins through a symbolic defence of the working-class community and Sabbath through a drug-induced escape from the constraints of class, made possible by a class-fractional alliance, composed of (majority) working-class ‘hairies’ and (minority) middle-class ‘hippies’, which represented (as the skins recognised only too well) a symbolic rejection of key embedded ‘puritan’ components of working-class culture, and in the case of the ‘hippies’, the radical-intellectual rejection of the majority-conservatism of their ‘parent-culture’. Moving forward, what needs to be identified and redeployed in contemporary analysis is to what extent and in what ways do middle-class metal fans ‘appropriate’ (and ‘expropriate’) aspects of working-class subcultural styles and how does this lead to a class-fractional alliance in the formation of global-local scene or modes of collaborative metal fandom.