Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and

Nationhood: (Re)sounding Whiteness

1st Edition Catherine Hoad
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/heavy-metal-music-texts-and-nationhood-resounding-
whiteness-1st-edition-catherine-hoad/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Metal on Merseyside : Music Scenes, Community and

Locality 1st Edition Nedim Hassan

https://ebookmass.com/product/metal-on-merseyside-music-scenes-
community-and-locality-1st-edition-nedim-hassan/

Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia

1st ed. Edition Jon Stratton

https://ebookmass.com/product/multiculturalism-whiteness-and-
otherness-in-australia-1st-ed-edition-jon-stratton/

Heavy Weather Sailing, 8th Edition Martin Thomas

https://ebookmass.com/product/heavy-weather-sailing-8th-edition-
martin-thomas/

Performing Nationhood: The Emotional Roots of Swadeshi

Nationhood in Bengal, 1905-1912 Mimasha Pandit

https://ebookmass.com/product/performing-nationhood-the-
emotional-roots-of-swadeshi-nationhood-in-
bengal-1905-1912-mimasha-pandit/
Metal Oxide-Based Nanofibers and Their Applications
Esposito V.

https://ebookmass.com/product/metal-oxide-based-nanofibers-and-
their-applications-esposito-v/

Mortal Music Ann Parker

https://ebookmass.com/product/mortal-music-ann-parker-2/

Metal Oxide Powder Technologies: Fundamentals,

Processing Methods and Applications (Metal Oxides) 1st
Edition Yarub Al-Douri (Editor)

https://ebookmass.com/product/metal-oxide-powder-technologies-
fundamentals-processing-methods-and-applications-metal-
oxides-1st-edition-yarub-al-douri-editor/

Nigerian Literary Imagination and the Nationhood

Project Toyin Falola

https://ebookmass.com/product/nigerian-literary-imagination-and-
the-nationhood-project-toyin-falola/

Metal-free synthetic organic dyes Kruger

https://ebookmass.com/product/metal-free-synthetic-organic-dyes-
kruger/
LEISURE STUDIES IN A GLOBAL ERA

Heavy Metal Music,

Texts, and Nationhood
(Re)sounding Whiteness

Catherine Hoad
 Leisure Studies in a Global Era

Series Editors
Karl Spracklen, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK
Karen Fox, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
In this book series, we defend leisure as a meaningful, theoretical, framing
concept; and critical studies of leisure as a worthwhile intellectual and
pedagogical activity. This is what makes this book series distinctive: we
want to enhance the discipline of leisure studies and open it up to a
richer range of ideas; and, conversely, we want sociology, cultural geogra-
phies and other social sciences and humanities to open up to engaging
with critical and rigorous arguments from leisure studies. Getting beyond
concerns about the grand project of leisure, we will use the series to
demonstrate that leisure theory is central to understanding wider debates
about identity, postmodernity and globalisation in contemporary soci-
eties across the world. The series combines the search for local, qualita-
tively rich accounts of everyday leisure with the international reach of
debates in politics, leisure and social and cultural theory. In doing this,
we will show that critical studies of leisure can and should continue to
play a central role in understanding society. The scope will be global,
striving to be truly international and truly diverse in the range of authors
and topics.

Editorial Board
John Connell, Professor of Geography, University of Sydney, USA
Yoshitaka Mori, Associate Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan
Smitha Radhakrishnan, Assistant Professor, Wellesley College, USA
Diane M. Samdahl, Professor of Recreation and Leisure Studies, Univer-
sity of Georgia, USA
Chiung-Tzu Lucetta Tsai, Associate Professor, National Taipei University,
Taiwan
Walter van Beek, Professor of Anthropology and Religion, Tilburg
University, The Netherlands
Sharon D. Welch, Professor of Religion and Society, Meadville Theolog-
ical School, Chicago, USA
Leslie Witz, Professor of History, University of the Western Cape, South
Africa

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14823
 Catherine Hoad

Heavy Metal Music,

Texts,
and Nationhood
(Re)sounding Whiteness
Catherine Hoad
College of Creative Arts
Massey University
Wellington, New Zealand

Leisure Studies in a Global Era

ISBN 978-3-030-67618-6 ISBN 978-3-030-67619-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67619-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting,
reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical
way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software,
or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland
AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

This book came together in what has probably been the strangest year of
my life. When I returned home to Australia for Christmas in late 2019,
the fires raging through my home state seemed all-encompassing; their
impact too overwhelming to fathom. Now, in September of 2020, the
fires seem a distant memory. Back in Aotearoa, life has been brought to a
standstill by the COVID-19 pandemic in many ways, but global politics
seems to surge on in increasingly troubling forms. Attempting to write a
book under these conditions has been interesting, to say the least.
This research has its roots in my Ph.D. studies, which I completed in
2016. Metal has changed and developed in myriad ways in the period
since I first became interested in how these themes of nationalism, colo-
niality and Whiteness manifest in metal’s texts, practices and discourses.
Nevertheless, scenes worldwide continue to offer complex and engaging
sites for analysis, which has expanded the bounds of my original doctoral
research. I want to thank Rosemary Overell and Pauwke Berkers for their
encouragement to pursue this work beyond my Ph.D. I also wish to
extend my deep gratitude to Dr. Ian Collinson, who was my supervisor
in this time, and who has continued to be a great support and friend in
the years since I completed my studies.

v
vi Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to my colleagues and friends at Massey

University, particularly Bridget and Birgit, who have been incred-
ibly supportive over this book-writing adventure, and also wonderfully
patient with me as I waded through the depths of editing misery. I am
hugely thankful to the wonderful editorial team at Palgrave for their
understanding and guidance throughout this process, particularly Balaji
and Sharla, and a special mention to Karl Spracklen, who, like another
bearded theorist named Karl, has been an academic hero of mine since I
first discovered his work.
Finally, I want to thank my mum, dad and brother, from whom I’ve
been separated by virtue of closed borders for the better part of a year.
Thank you for playing Sabbath and Dio on repeat during my formative
years; for never batting an eyelid when I said I wanted to do a Ph.D. in
metal; and for always being there for me. I love you and hope that by the
time this is published, I can deliver a copy to you in person.

September 2020 Catherine Hoad

 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 17
3 Norwegian Black Metal and Viking Metal 59
4 Afrikaans Metal in Post-Apartheid South Africa 109
5 Normophilia and Banal Nationalism in Australian
Extreme Metal 151
6 (Re)sounding, (re)sealing: Translocal Terrains
of Whiteness across Norway, South Africa
and Australia 197
7 Conclusion 245

Index 257

vii
 1
Introduction

All you white kids out there, let me tell you something that no other
motherfucking band, no other white band, in the world has any guts to
say. I’m just saying right now, when you wake up in the motherfucking
morning, and you look at yourself in the goddamn mirror, hey, have all
the fucking pride in your heart man, have all the fucking pride in the
world man. Because we are the great people and hey, you know what,
maybe, just maybe, tonight is a white thing.
—Philip H. Anselmo, Montreal, March 4th 1995.

This lengthy speech by Pantera’s then-frontman Phil Anselmo occurred

during a break in their set on the Canadian leg of the band’s ‘Far Beyond
Touring’ world tour. Pantera were not a racist band, Anselmo declared,
but he had a ‘problem’ with ‘black culture’, which he believed advo-
cated the killing of white people. On face value, this drunken tirade by
Anselmo—one for which he later apologised, and repeatedly attempted
to distance himself from—was an early example in a longer line of prob-
lematic, if naïve, racial rhetoric from the frontman of one of metal’s
biggest acts.1 Anselmo and Pantera had capitalised upon their own

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Hoad, Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and Nationhood,
Leisure Studies in a Global Era,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67619-3_1
2 C. Hoad

self-crafted image as cowboys from hell, ‘good ol’ Southern boys’ who
espoused heritage, not hate; whose lead guitarist shredded on a custom-
designed guitar bearing the Confederate flag, and whose merchandise
had long born this symbol.2 This five minute monologue, punctuated
throughout by loud cheering from the crowd, was perhaps more notable
for its tacit assumptions than Anselmo’s outright declarations that white
men were victims of discrimination. It was Anselmo’s direct categori-
sation of Pantera as a ‘white band’, his confidence in addressing his
audience as a uniformly white ‘we’. Most significant of all, it was the
statement that tonight, a heavy metal concert in one of the biggest cities
in North America, was ‘a white thing’.
Anselmo’s now 25-year-old characterisation of metal as a ‘white thing’
remains a source of deep interest to me, as it taps in to a broader and
immeasurably complex problem of how whiteness has been discussed
and understood within heavy metal music, both as a site of academic
inquiry and force of cultural significance. The apparent demographic
abundance of young white men within metal is a common feature
of scholarly and popular appraisals of the genre, but the political and
cultural significance of such whiteness has gone largely uninterrogated.
Furthermore, the global circulation of heavy metal has meant that claims
as to the large-scale whiteness of metal’s audience need revaluation, if not
total deconstruction. Metal has nonetheless remained a white-dominated
discourse, and white hegemony is deeply entrenched in the dominant
ways of thinking about and representing heavy metal. Similarly, that
Anselmo’s Montreal speech is still referenced and the video shared by
mainstream metal press such as Loudwire, Blabbermouth and Metal
Hammer more than two decades on, and continues to invoke conver-
sation and debate amongst scene members, suggests a great deal about
the complicity of texts in sustaining such discourses. Following this, in
this book I ask how, when metal bands and fans are present in every
continent, has metal maintained a reputation as a ‘white’ genre? More-
over, how has white metal masculinity been affixed as the ‘norm’, when
women and persons of colour constitute visible and vital presences within
scenes? Metal is a global genre, but its whiteness is continually imbued
with an instrumental significance.
 1 Introduction 3

The goal of this book is twofold: to negotiate scholarly ways of

addressing representations of whiteness in metal that move beyond
discussions of demographics, virtuosity and spectacular racism, and to
critically engage with texts as key carriers of instrumental white hege-
mony within metal scenes. The title here is thus a play on the duality
of (re)sounding: whiteness resounds in metal’s dominant histories, yet
the genre itself constantly renegotiates the musicocultural sounds of such
whiteness, and attempts at re-sounding accordingly. The book argues
that the whiteness and white heteromasculinity of heavy metal emerges
across disparate locales as an expression of a series of distinct, nationally-
situated projects. Such projects are realised, in my analysis, through the
procession of texts which are produced within and shape the histories
of specific heavy metal scenes. Norman Fairclough (1992) pointed out
that texts serve an ideological purpose of naming or wording the social
and natural world, shaping them for particular purposes and in the inter-
ests of certain privileged groups (185–190). As a form of social practice,
the construction and transmission of knowledge through texts is tied
to specific historical and sociocultural contexts, and, as Yongbing Liu
has argued, texts are a core means by which existing social relations are
produced or contested, and different interests are served (Liu, 2008: 59).
In this way, this book draws on a longer tradition in critical
theory which argues that texts are intrinsically tied to the construction
and maintenance of national identity (Anderson, 1991; Hall, 1997).
However, I also draw this relationship into focus through its intersec-
tions with whiteness, where texts are similarly essential to the imagining
and representation of whiteness as a social, cultural and political cate-
gory (Burton, 2009). The objective of my work here is thus to unveil
the (in)visibility of whiteness within heavy metal scenes, and indicate
how such whitenesses are deployed within particular countries, as both
explicit political violence and instrumental hegemony. In particular, I
look to examples from Norway, South Africa and Australia to consider
the ways in which whiteness has emerged and been both negotiated and
contested in the textual practices of specific metallic communities in
these nations.
Through examining texts emergent from these distinct metal scenes,
this book explores three key forms of nationalism—Norway’s monstrous
4 C. Hoad

nationalism, South Africa’s resistant nationalism and Australia’s banal

nationalism—through which processions of whiteness are realised and
articulated. These three forms are not demonstrative or exhaustive of
the metallic discourses in these countries, but they serve as pertinent
examples of the ways in which national, gendered and ethnicised poli-
tics become entangled within scenes, and reproduced and reconstructed
in and through texts. Such constellations of whiteness and nationhood
have enabled both tacit and explicit constructions of exclusionary white-
ness to foster a sense of community formed through collective memory
and territory. These scenes, as I explore, are demonstrative of the ways
in which white inflections inform the texts and practices of heavy metal
scenes, and the specifically local whitenesses manifest within them.
This book is concerned with interrogating the means through which
whiteness gains expression in distinct cultural contexts, the national
specificity with which whiteness is valorised in certain segments of metal
scenes, and how disparate national identities are both tacitly and explic-
itly tied to white heteromasculine identity. In doing so, I emphasise
from the outset that I do not conceive of heavy metal, nor whiteness, as
inherently racist.3 Such an immediate reactionary definition ignores the
political and structural complexities of whiteness in its most tacit mani-
festations. I also do not suggest that scene members in Norway, South
Africa and Australia ought to conceive of their generic and cultural histo-
ries and present as overtly (or even necessarily covertly) racist. Nor does
this research emerge as a call to deny white people, including the bands
and individuals mentioned throughout, an identity either in metal, or at
large. White people are a material reality—however, it is the way they are
thought of as being white that makes the difference (Blaagaard, 2006: 4).
The ways in which metal is ‘thought of as being white’, in both schol-
arly research and popular texts, is hence core to my analysis. In this way
I am indebted to the ongoing interventions provided by Karl Spracklen
(2020), who has done the vital groundwork of showing how metal music
might be seen as a leisure space that resist the norms and values of the
mainstream; but might also serve to re-affirm and construct those norms
and values.
 1 Introduction 5

The objective here is not to refuse white people the right to group
identification and belonging, or to demand that white people eradi-
cate all identity and hereditary connections (Outlaw, 2004: 167–168),
but instead to observe how whiteness and its embedded ideologies have
operated as central structuring frameworks for metal culture, even as the
genre continues to expand. The normalisation, construction and perfor-
mance of narrow imaginings of whiteness, masculinity and nationhood
within heavy metal texts can have profound, pervasive and system-
atic oppressive consequences for non-white people, women and Queer
communities. This research also responds to a long-standing trend
in Metal Music Studies wherein whiteness has been perceived of as
largely unified or hegemonic. The quest in pointing to the fragmen-
tation and multiplicity of whitenesses across three different countries
is to deconstruct this notion of uniformity, and call into question the
strategic political position that emerges in treating whiteness as a uniform
category.

Metal and Critical Whiteness Studies

Tracking the linked dimensions of whiteness that emerge within metal
scenes, texts and scholarship necessitates, in the first instance, a crit-
ical foregrounding of ‘whiteness’ itself. I draw from previous schol-
arly work which situates whiteness as a particular structural location;
as a ‘standpoint’ from which white people look at themselves, at
others and at society; and a set of cultural practices that are usually
unmarked and unnamed (Frankenberg, 1993: 1). Whiteness furthermore
emerges as a multiplicity of identities that are historically-grounded, class
specific, politically manipulated and gendered social locations (Twine &
Gallagher, 2008: 6). Analyses of whiteness must address cultural sites
such as music scenes as ‘popular spaces where collective white identities
are produced and white identities normalised’ (Twine & Gallagher, 2008:
15). Metal Music Studies must reveal not only whiteness, but whitenesses
as they emerge through specific geographic, demographic, cultural and
political discourses.
6 C. Hoad

Much as this book is an interrogation of how metal and white-

ness function in different national contexts, it also serves as a study
of how Metal Music Studies, as an academic field, has been—perhaps
unwittingly—complicit in the continued imagining of metal’s ostensibly
‘inherent’ whiteness. Where Metal Music Studies has gained traction as
an interdisciplinary subject field committed to research and developing
theory surrounding heavy metal music, scenes, communities, cultures
and practices, the field has until recently lacked sustained critiques of
metal’s reputation as a ‘white musical genre’ (Bayer, 2009: 185). More-
over, Metal Music Studies itself is of central importance to understanding
the role of music cultures across the globe. There are over one hundred
thousand heavy metal bands worldwide,4 and fans themselves number
in the millions. Metal fans are the most loyal listeners worldwide (van
Buskirk, 2015) and the centrality of metal to daily cultural life for indi-
viduals and communities across hundreds of nations indicates that it
is a genre of substantial cultural significance and creative force. Metal
has been conspicuous in its ability to mobilise sentiments of national
and ethnic identity. It is thus vital for Metal Music Studies to address
the implications of its own complicity in constructing and representing
heavy metal as a white-dominated, masculine space.
Heavy metal is a discourse dominated by whiteness, and white hege-
mony has long been deeply entrenched in the dominant ways of
representing metal music, cultures and practices. Metal is a site that
both enables a tradition of exclusion and nostalgic (re)production of
purity, yet also defines its whiteness through dominant images of white
musicians, industry workers and racialised marketing tools (Spracklen,
2013a). Such definitions and representations are thus the sites through
which ‘collective white identities are produced and white identities
normalised’, to look again to Twine and Gallagher (2008: 15). Metal’s
whiteness has been affixed with normative value, and hence its mech-
anisms are rendered invisible. The task I want to mount in this book
is then to dismantle the representational hegemony of whiteness within
metal scenes, and map how such textual processions of whiteness are
deployed with national specificity.
This research owes a debt to the critical work which has preceded and
heavily influenced it. I speak particularly of Robert Walser’s declaration
 1 Introduction 7

that the generic cohesion of heavy metal depends upon the ‘desire of
young white male performers and fans to hear and believe in certain
stories about the nature of masculinity’ (1993: 110), and Karl Spracklen’s
mapping of how metal constructs a hegemonic whiteness (2010, 2013a,
2013b, 2015, 2020) that is sustained along classed, raced and gendered
lines which cater to a national imaginary, and maintains an imagined
community (Lucas et al., 2011; Spracklen et al., 2014). Mapping how
metal’s texts offer a canon through which fans are able to ‘hear and
believe’ these stories, and their subsequent role in maintaining an imag-
ined community, is core to the work I want to enact here. Furthermore,
mapping how the nature of these textual dynamics shift across contexts
and national histories is core to this work, where the instrumental white-
ness of heavy metal scenes across disparate locales is yet to be adequately
critiqued or acknowledged in the wider field.
Previous research into the political and cultural significance of white-
ness in popular music has largely focused on the cultural politics of punk
(e.g. Duncombe & Tremblay, 2011), pop (Stras, 2010) and rock (Frith,
[1978] 1987). The understandings of the politics of whiteness in popular
music that have emerged from this research situate whiteness as a cultural
norm against which the musics and musical performances of ‘Others’
have been evaluated. Recent understandings of the functions of white-
ness in leisure have been able to tease out the conscious and unconscious
power structures embedded within both music scenes, industries, jour-
nalism and research itself (Schaap, 2015, 2019; Spracklen, 2013a). While
moves have been made to conceive of music scenes as sites of instru-
mental whiteness (Spracklen, 2013a: 63) where white discourses function
in both overt and tacit ways, these understandings have only recently
started to emerge in studies of metal. Much metal literature positions
heavy metal as a ‘white genre’, though current understandings overlook
the political and cultural implications of this categorisation, and obscure
the structuring mechanisms of white hegemony. Where the sub-field of
‘Global’ Metal Studies has provided a necessary disruption to orthodox
representations of metal audiences as universally white, such approaches
nevertheless continue to saturate whiteness in normative value.
There remains a need to draw attention to the political significance
of metal’s whiteness, and demonstrate its national manifestations. Doing
8 C. Hoad

so necessitates moving metallic whiteness beyond discussions of white-

ness as purely demographic, or whiteness as a normative site against
which ‘global’ metal can be evaluated. Tracking the textual narrations
and formations of white patriarchal nationhood as they are expressed
in disparate metal contexts can therefore offer a new line of enquiry to
Metal Music Studies, and contribute to the uses of textual analysis as
a methodological tool within Whiteness Studies. Doing so provides an
alternate perspective to claims that the cultural significance of metal’s
whiteness is ‘less an affirmation of whiteness than it is an absence—an
obtrusive absence—of blacks’ (Weinstein, 2000: 111), and that metal’s
whiteness is overstated or that studies have centred ‘primarily [on]
whiteness’ (Phillipov, 2012: 65).
This book engages with the following questions as a means of combat-
ting these challenges. I ask how textual representations of whiteness
create a ‘normal’ scenic centre which correlates heavy metal with white,
Western, heteromasculinity. Moreover, I ask how his normative whiteness
naturalises the dominance of young white men within representations of
heavy metal, to the exclusion and marginalisation of Others, with specific
national implications. These questions also outline broader possibilities
for the field of Metal Music Studies. How do we speak about whiteness
in metal in ways that move beyond current discussions of demographics,
virtuosity and explicit racism? How can research undertaken in Metal
Music Studies reveal and renegotiate hidden mechanisms of whiteness,
and point to its multiplicity and meanings across global metal scenes,
practices and cultures?

Objectives and Methodology

Much of this research emerged from with my own personal engage-
ment with and experiences of metal. I am situated within this research
in my capacity as a longtime metal fan and regular participant in
Australia’s thrash, grindcore and death metal scenes, and later in those
of Aotearoa/New Zealand; I am also a fan of many of the bands and
works discussed here. In acknowledging my position within both the
metal scene and academia, while I have often experienced Othering by
 1 Introduction 9

virtue of being a metal fan who is also a woman within various contexts,
my whiteness has conferred upon me certain forms of capital. This
project at large has necessitated my own awareness of my privilege as
a white woman working within an academic environment, and further-
more, forced my own critical reckoning with how I, as a fan, navigate
material and discourses within metal which may emerge as contrary to
my own anti-racist politics. My goal is not to further entrench the posi-
tion of white heterosexual masculinity within metal by devoting another
academic book to this topic, but rather precisely to destabilise this posi-
tion by pointing to the contextually-specific mechanisms and discourses
that enable its centrality across seemingly disparate locations.
Textual analysis is a key method within this research, wherein texts
generated by heavy metal scenes—individual songs, lyrics, album art and
promotional material—provide tangible artefacts for mapping symbolic
discourses of power, nationhood and their narration and representation.
I am also interested in texts as they exist in the discourses and oral tradi-
tions produced and reproduced by fans. Such material can seemingly join
text with reception, and potentially blur the traditionally parasocial rela-
tions between producers, performers and audiences. Fans consume texts,
but they also generate their own which contribute to a wider reposi-
tory of discourses, symbols and meanings; fans both shape and generate
narratives and practices of heavy metal. Fan texts also offer sources of
meaning which operate beyond the institutional frameworks of ‘official’
texts—commercially released albums, promotional material, autobiogra-
phies and so on—a DIY context which further reveals the possibilities
and applications of textual analysis as a tool for engaging with the inter-
pretation of social and cultural meaning. In utilising textual and critical
discourse analysis, I am interested in not only the materiality of texts, as
tangible scenic products of heavy metal, but also how discourse regulates
sentiments of scenic identity and belonging. Analysis of live concerts, fan
magazines, underground zines, interviews, podcasts and online discus-
sion spaces such as forums and social media sites—as Kahn-Harris has
observed, ‘one can be an active member of the scene from one’s own
home’ (2007: 74)—further reveals how texts are centrally implicated in
in the dominant ways of speaking about and conceiving of the identity
of national scenes, and the wider national contexts they exist within.
10 C. Hoad

Structure of the Book

This book consists of five chapters. The first examines the history of
metal’s discursive formations in academic and popular texts, exploring
the growth of Metal Music Studies as a consolidated field, and its repre-
sentations and legacies. In Chapter 3, I undertake a critical analysis of
how whiteness has been represented and performed within Norwegian
black and Viking metal scenes, mapping how this is embedded within
the wider national imperative of maintaining ‘Norwegianness’, and the
tensions this entails. Chapter 4 explores the role of heavy metal within
the texts of the ‘cultural heritage industry’ of post-Apartheid South
Africa, with a specific focus on the Afrikaans heavy metal scene as a
response to the ‘loss’ of Afrikaner identity. Chapter 5, the final national
case study, investigates the ways in which the mutually supportive oper-
ations of masculinity and whiteness have shored up Australian identity
within the spaces of Australia’s extreme (thrash, black and death) metal
scenes.
Chapters 6 and 7 offers a critical comparison and synthesis of the
three previous national case studies, and a reflection upon and further
critique of the ways in which metal can be understood within the theo-
retical frameworks of nationalism and Whiteness studies. In this chapter,
I question how metal’s mythologised rhetoric of rebellion may be crit-
ically engaged in analysing how nationalist and racialised orthodoxies
can be reinforced through metal texts. I nevertheless also consider how
metal scenes themselves have taken critical tools beyond the academy. By
engaging with the critical anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic
work that metal scenes perform, I consider how making visible the frag-
mentary nature of whiteness in heavy metal can act as a mechanism
within this anti-racist project. In this way, I hope that expanding the
theoretical tools of Metal Music Studies can assist in destabilising the
greater systemic and structural inequalities which permeate and circle
through scenes.
 1 Introduction 11

Conclusion
Through the following discussions of textual processions of whiteness
in metal scenes across Norway, South Africa and Australia, this books
makes a case for Metal Music Studies to make metallic whiteness not
only more visible, but more aware of its representations, mediations
and constructions. In destabilising the normative position of white
masculinity within metal texts and practices, and pointing to its realisa-
tions across seemingly disparate geographical locations, metal scholarship
may cast the same academic gaze inwards and make visible the mech-
anisms of whitenesses as they manifest in heavy metal scenes, cultures
and practices, and the way academics themselves document and theo-
rise metal. Ultimately the objective of this book is not to renounce
or abolish whitenesses in metal, but rather to consider how white-
nesses have emerged as dominant markers around which identities are
formed and maintained, often in exclusory formations. Metal has been
a rich site of identity work for scene members and communities inter-
sected across multiple axes. Drawing into focus the textually-mediated
discourses which have structured metal’s dominant images and practices
can then enable us to map where metal has and continues to grow, as the
genre enters its seventh decade.

Notes
1. Further to these remarks made in 1995, critics of Anselmo also point to
anti-Semetic and Islamophobic lyrics in the 2003 track ‘Stealing a Page or
Two from Armed and Radical Pagans’ by his side project Superjoint Ritual
(c.f. Rosenberg, 2016) and a 2016 incident in which a video filmed by
a fan and posted to YouTube showed Anselmo offering a Nazi salute and
shouting white pride slogans (Brannigan, 2016). In reponse to the latter,
Anselmo commented on the video via his label Housecore Records, claiming
the salute was an ‘inside joke’ (Chris/Youtube, 2016). While Anselmo has
long denied charges of racism, including a 2019 interview with Kerrang! In
which he claimed that while he was ‘reckless and …absurd on purpose’,
he did not ‘have a racist bone in [his] body’ (Law, 2019), these incidents
12 C. Hoad

resulted in New Zealand venues cancelling Anselmo’s booked shows in 2019

following the Christchurch massacre (Reid, 2019).
2. In 2015, Anselmo addressed his own changing relationship to the Confed-
erate flag, stating ‘These days, I wouldn’t want anything to fucking do
with it because truthfully…I wouldn’t…The way I feel and the group of
people I’ve had to work with my whole life, you see a Confederate flag
out there that says ‘Heritage, not hate.’ I’m not so sure I’m buying into
that’ (Grow, 2015). While Anselmo displayed a changed attitude toward
the flag, and much of this merchandise was pulled by Pantera’s webstore, his
former bandmate Vinny Paul referred to it as a ‘knee jerk reaction’ (Sticks
for Stones, 2015).
3. Responses to actions by Phil Anselmo in 2016, wherein he appeared to offer
a white pride salute during a show (Hollywood, January 2, 2016), indicate
that anti-racism is a sentiment strongly held among many scene members,
and that racism and white pride remain a central site of conflict within
metal scenes (c.f. Rosenberg, 2016).
4. Wallach et al. note that in mid-2007 the online Encyclopaedia Metallum
contained listings for 47,626 metal bands from 129 countries (2011: 5)—as
of September 2020, it lists 139,135 bands from 151 countries.

References
Anselmo, P. H. (1995, March 4). Pantera. Far Beyond Touring, Auditorium de
Verdun, Montreal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxQk3DC3gL0.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. Verso.
Bayer, G. (2009). Rocking the nation: One global audience, one flag? In G.
Bayer (Ed.), Heavy metal music in Britain (pp. 181–194). Ashgate.
Blaagaard, B. B. (2006). Relocating whiteness in Nordic media discourse.
Rethinking Nordic colonialism: A postcolonial exhibition project in five acts.
NIFCE, Nordic Institute for contemporary art, Helsinki. http://www.rethin
king-nordic-colonialism.org/files/pdf/ACT5/ESSAYS/Blaagaard.pdf.
Brannigan, P. (2016, January 29). Why Phil Anselmo’s ‘White Power’ outburst
shouldn’t be ignored. Metal Hammer/LouderSound . https://www.louder
sound.com/features/why-phil-anselmo-s-white-power-outburst-shouldn-t-
be-ignored.
 1 Introduction 13

Burton, D. (2009). “Reading” whiteness in consumer research. Consumption,

Markets and Culture, 12(2), 171–201.
Chris R. (2016, January 28). Phil Anselmo is a Racist! Ruins Dimebash 2016.
Youtube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVaUlXfvOHg&lc=z12
4vttarwy1v5son04cihtiry3dfhn4kco.
Duncombe, S., & Tremblay, M. (Eds.). (2011). White riot: Punk rock and the
politics of race. Verso.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.
Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters. University of Minnesota
Press.
Frith, S. ([1978] 1987). Sound effects: Youth, leisure and the politics of rock ‘n’
roll . London: Constable.
Grow, K. (2015, July 13). Phil Anselmo on Confederate flag: I don’t want
anything to do with it. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/
music-news/phil-anselmo-on-confederate-flag-i-dont-want-anything-to-do-
with-it-185068/.
Hall, S. (1997). The spectacle of the “other.” In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation:
Cultural representation and signifying practices (pp. 223–290). Sage.
Kahn-Harris, K. (2007). Extreme metal: Music and culture on the edge. New
York: Berg.
Law, S. (2019, May 7). Phil Anselmo: “I am reckless and I am absurd
on purpose”. Kerrang! https://www.kerrang.com/features/phil-anselmo-i-
am-reckless-i-am-absurd-and-i-am-all-over-the-place-on-purpose/.
Liu, Y. (2008). The construction of patriotic discourse in Chinese basal readers.
In R. Dolón & J. Todolí (Eds.), Analysing identities in discourse (pp. 57–76).
John Benjamins.
Lucas, C., Deeks, M., & Spracklen, K. (2011). Grim up north: Northern
England, Northern Europe and black metal. Journal for Cultural Research,
15 (3), 279–295.
Metal Archives. (n.d.). https://www.metal-archives.com.
Outlaw, L. T. (2004). Rehabilitate racial whiteness? In G. Yancy (Ed.), What
white looks like: African-American philosophers on the whiteness question
(pp. 159–160). New York: Routledge.
Phillipov, M. (2012). Death metal and music criticism: Analysis at the limits.
Lexington Books.
Reid, P. (2019, March 20). NZ venues cancel concerts by former Pantera
frontman over racist remarks. The Industry Observer. https://theindustryobse
rver.thebrag.com/nz-venues-cancel-concerts-by-former-pantera-frontman-
over-racist-remarks/.
14 C. Hoad

Rosenberg, A. (2016, January 28). Editorial: The metal community must

stop letting Phil Anselmo off the hook for his racist remarks. Metal
Sucks. http://www.metalsucks.net/2016/01/28/editorial-the-metal-commun
ity-must-stop-letting-phil-anselmo-off-the-hook-for-his-racist-remarks/.
Schaap, J. (2015). Just like Hendrix: Whiteness and the online critical and
consumer reception of rock music in the United States, 2003–2013. Popular
Communication: THe International Journal of Media and Culture, 13(4),
272–287.
Schaap, J. (2019). Elvis has finally left the building? Boundary work, whiteness
and the reception of rock music in comparative perspective. Erasmus University.
Spracklen, K. (2010). True Aryan black metal: The meaning of leisure,
belonging and the construction of whiteness in black metal music. In N. R.
W. Scott (Ed.), Metal void: First gatherings (pp. 81–92). Inter-Disciplinary
Press.
Spracklen, K. (2013a). Whiteness and leisure. Palgrave Macmillan.
Spracklen, K. (2013b). Nazi punks folk off: Leisure, nationalism, cultural iden-
tity and the consumption of metal and folk music. Leisure Studies, 32(4),
415–428.
Spracklen, K. (2015). ‘To Holmgard… and Beyond’: Folk metal fantasies and
hegemonic white masculinities. Metal Music Studies, 1(3), 359–377.
Spracklen, K. (2020). Metal music and the re-imagining of masculinity, place,
race and nation. Emerald Group Publishing.
Spracklen, K., Lucas, C., & Deeks, M. (2014). The Construction of heavy
metal identity through heritage narratives: A case study of extreme metal
bands in the North of England. Popular Music and Society, 37 (1), 48–64.
Sticks for Stones. (2015, July 15). INTERVIEW: Vinnie Paul
(HELLYEAH/PANTERA). https://www.sticksforstones.net/single-post/
2015/07/15/interview-vinnie-paul-hellyeahpantera.
Stras, L. (Ed.). (2010). She’s so fine: Reflections on whiteness, femininity, adoles-
cence and class in 1960s music. Ashgate.
Twine, F. W., & Gallagher, C. (2008). The future of whiteness: A map of the
‘third wave.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(1), 4–24.
van Buskirk, E. (2015). Which music genres have the most loyal fans? Spotify
Insights. https://insights.spotify.com/us/2015/04/02/loyalest-music-fans-by-
genre/.
Wallach, J., Berger, H. M., & Greene, P. D. (2011). Affective overdrive, scene
dynamics, and identity in the global metal scene. In J. Wallach, H. M.
Berger, & P. D. Greene (Eds.), Metal rules the globe: Heavy metal music
around the world (pp. 3–33). Duke University Press.
 1 Introduction 15

Walser, R. (1993). Running with the devil: Power, gender and madness in heavy
metal music. Wesleyan University Press.
Weinstein, D. ([1991] 2000). Heavy metal: The music and its culture (Revised
Edition). Da Capo Press.
 2
Mapping Representation in Metal Music
Studies

Introduction
Scholarly and popular accounts of heavy metal have long looked to texts
produced within scenes as a medium for both the analysis and docu-
mentation of practices, identities and cultures, across myriad contexts.
As metal has developed worldwide as both a musical style and culture,
discussions, representations and analyses of the genre have grown and
diversified. Critical engagements with heavy metal have progressed from
their earliest days of moral panics and disdainful condemnations of its
musical and social worth into an academic field—Metal Music Studies—
that engages with the complex and multifaceted ways in which heavy
metal music, scenes and cultures are experienced globally. However, just
as academic and popular texts alike have moved away from negative and
often limited depictions of heavy metal music and its fans, particularly
in tracking its growth beyond Anglo-American contexts, much of metal’s
textual canon has continued to depict of the traditional ‘centre’ of heavy
metal as the province of young white men.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Hoad, Heavy Metal Music, Texts, and Nationhood,
Leisure Studies in a Global Era,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67619-3_2
18 C. Hoad

This chapter responds to the issues proposed in the introduction by

analysing how white hegemony is entrenched in the dominant ways of
thinking about metal music, cultures and practices. In picking up my
immediate concern with texts as carriers of this hegemony, popular and
scholarly texts about heavy metal have, somewhat paradoxically, been
key enablers in the conception of a ‘normal’ scenic centre that correlates
heavy metal with white, Western, heteromasculinity. These representa-
tions have naturalised the dominance of young white men within metal,
to the exclusion and marginalisation of Others. Furthermore, such texts
enter into a complex network of discourses of nationhood, belonging and
exclusivity when they are taken up within specific national formations
and representations. The question of ‘representation’ is hence central to
this chapter, which engages Metal Music Studies as a field: as Robert
Walser (2011: 333) has noted, ‘what is at stake, as always, is not just the
actual nature of a reality that is to be represented, but the context of the
representing, its purpose’.
Interrogating the contexts and purposes of metal’s textual representa-
tions is core to understanding the ways in which exclusory imaginings of
metal scenes are tied to and represented within the wider socio-cultural
politics of ethnonational belonging. Popular texts have played a crucial
role in heavy metal’s cultural image both historically (c.f. Brown, 2015:
263) and contemporaneously, where understandings of metal music and
its fans have been largely mediated through both fictional and ‘factual’
representations. Such representations have contributed to definitions
of metal scenes, influencing the ‘myths’ associated with such scenes
and continually restructuring their meanings for audiences (Hassan,
2010: 246). Developments in Metal Music Studies have been crucial
to informing both public sentiment about metal and scene members’
understandings of their ‘own’ scenes, yet the reception and legacies of
the field are enmeshed within a series of dominant paradigms which can
reinforce the marginality felt at the level of individual scenic experiences.
Scholarship about heavy metal has, for a large portion of its history,
created and constituted the default heavy metal scene member as white,
heterosexual and male. In creating this default position, metal schol-
arship has often reinscribed the same exclusionary logics of scenic
engagement that has marginalised and exscribed women and non-white
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 19

Others from the spatial and cultural sites of heavy metal. This trend has
been buttressed by the dominant modes of mapping identity—sexual,
gendered, raced and classed—within heavy metal. Where scholarship
has repeatedly noted that metal is a masculinised genre, dominated
by masculinist codes of representation and legitimisation, literature has
largely only mapped spectacular displays of hypermasculinity and as such
has often allowed conventional masculine performativity to uncritiqued.
Furthermore, where heavy metal scholarship does map whiteness, it may
do so largely in ways that speak to demographics or virtuosity, without
offering a critique of its ideological foundations or political significance.
This chapter examines how Metal Music Studies, as an academic
field, has negotiated, resisted and reflected the wider structural condi-
tions of white hegemony. If we are to follow Barthes’ insistence that
that theory is a discursive practice, and the discursive practice of theory
is one that questions and challenges received ideas and orthodoxy that
dominate any language (1984), then it remains necessary to consider
how this approach this approach can be extended to assumptions held
by researchers or embedded within the research process itself (Stern,
1989). Metal Music Studies, which has its earliest incarnations in the
1980s, has diversified substantially in its disciplines, methods and areas of
focus, as it has developed. I am nonetheless interested in how whiteness
and white masculinity have been discussed in the field of Metal Music
Studies, in ways that have situated such categories as normative posi-
tions. I begin by addressing the foundational literature within Critical
Whiteness Studies; how its concerns are addressed by wider approaches
to leisure spaces; and how texts and textual analysis are situated within
this scope. In looking towards the applications of these methods to Metal
Music Studies, I critique four broad manifestations of metallic whiteness
that emerge within the academic literature: whiteness as an absence of
blackness; whiteness as Western working-class identity; whiteness as a
site of spectacular racism; and whiteness as creative virtuosity.
A further point of interest lies in how, in attempting to offer an
alternative to the staid orthodoxy of white hegemony, the literature of
‘global metal’ may also continue to entrench whiteness as the default
subject position within heavy metal cultures. The ‘Othering’ rhetoric
20 C. Hoad

emergent from ‘global metal’ as a model may be remediated with anal-

yses that address the structural hegemony of whiteness. The scenic logics
of heavy metal and metal scholarship have in many ways allowed for the
proliferation of an insider/outsider binary realised through micro- and
macro-level studies. Such research has often exoticised and marginalised
women and people of colour within heavy metal cultures through
taxonomies of difference, and the implementation of a centre/periphery
model represented large-scale through the discourse of ‘global metal’.
Doing so enables a revision of whiteness as not simply a demographic
category, but as an element in complex cultural practices.

Whiteness, Texts and Leisure

Textual analysis—which I define here as a methodological approach to
research which examines the content, structure, functions and meanings
generated by a text and its interrelated connections with an audience—
has a significant history within both Whiteness Studies and Popular
Music Studies, and is a methodology which continues to yield impor-
tant insights into the symbols and discourses which shape and constitute
the various fields of leisure, popular music performance, materials and
cultures. A ‘text’, in this sense, is understood as any object which can be
‘read’—i.e. analysed, interpreted and capable of transmitting or gener-
ating meaning. Traditionally, as Paul Ricoeur has noted, the text has been
taken to be literary—that is, written (1981). However, as he contends,
understanding of texts as ‘any discourse fixed by writing’ (1981) are inad-
equate in approaching the plurality and diversity of texts. This fixity of
writing has also been critiqued by scholars engaging with oral traditions
as sites of meaning and narrative practice, particularly for Indigenous
peoples and colonised populations (c.f. Hamilton, 1987; Klapproth,
2009). Expanding textual analysis into leisure sites such as music scenes
thus means calling into focus what can be heard, performed and expe-
rienced, and therein such texts’ characteristics and/or structure, or the
signs that convey meaning and allow interpretation for both the creator
and ‘reader’ alike.
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 21

Secondary to this question of where or what the text ‘is’ has been
the quandary of why texts matter, and indeed why textual analysis is
a valuable method for engaging with leisure spaces. In mapping the
uses and importance of textual analysis methods, Norman Fairclough’s
1995 account gives a definitive overview of the continued significance of
text-based research. Fairclough’s typification—theoretical, methodolog-
ical, historical and political—continues to provide a useful schema in
approaching not only the applications of the method, but also the value
of texts themselves to social and cultural formations. The influence of
this approach is summed up thus by Urpo Kovala:

The theoretical reason is that the social structures which are the focus of
attention of many social scientists, and texts, in turn, constitute one very
important form of social action. Further, as language is widely misin-
terpreted as transparent, the precise mechanisms and modalities of the
social and ideological work that language does in producing, reproducing
or transforming social structures, relations and identities, is routinely
overlooked. The methodological reason is that texts constitute a major
source of evidence for grounding claims about social structures, relations
and processes. The historical reason for the importance of textual anal-
ysis is that texts are sensitive barometers of social processes, movement
and diversity, and textual analysis can provide particularly good indica-
tors of social change. Finally, the political reason relates to social science
with critical objectives especially. Namely, it is increasingly through texts
(visual texts included) that social control and social domination are exer-
cised. Textual analysis can therefore be a political resource as well. (Kovala,
2002: 4)

I quote Kovala at length here precisely because this schematic demon-

strates the value of the ‘text’ to social and cultural phenomena, and their
implications, modalities and mechanisms therein. Such an approach is
immediately useful for studying the products of music scenes as they
mobilise not only the social and ideological work of the ‘scene’, but also
their wider role in reproducing or transforming the social structures that
scenes are situated within.
This intersection between where the text is located—physically,
temporally, geographically and ideologically—and the kinds of things the
22 C. Hoad

text can ‘do’ (and indeed, what can in turn be done to the text) is partic-
ularly useful in the context of popular music studies. However, textual
analysis has also had a long and vital history in the context of Whiteness
Studies and postcolonial theory. Edward Said, Stuart Hall and bell hooks
have definitively shown the ways in which texts act as racialised regimes
of representation (c.f. Hall, 1997) which construct and maintain imagin-
ings of ‘Others’ and the physical and cultural contexts they occupy (c.f.
Said, [1979] 1991); and furthermore, present such contexts as sites for
exotic consumption by white, western audiences (hooks, 1991). In the
context of Whiteness Studies, Dawn Burton (2009) notes that ‘recent
emphasis on language, wordplay, discourse analysis and the interpreta-
tion of texts, including literary ones, has been an instrumental feature in
the growth of literature on whiteness’ (2009: 172). If we are to consider
whiteness, as Burton suggests, as a theoretical tool or lens through which
social, institutional and textual relations can be examined and made
visible (2009: 174), then analysing, questioning and challenging the
received ideas and orthodoxies that emerge through images, words, and
sounds is key to engaging with the intersections of metal and nation-
hood, as both have been represented and experienced within what Toni
Morrison has called ‘the gaze of whiteness’ (1992).
Margaret L. Andersen provides a framework for mapping the contri-
butions of Whiteness Studies literature thus: the recognition that white-
ness is ubiquitous, but not typically acknowledged; that whiteness is a
system of privilege, and that all racial categories are constructed, albeit
with ‘radically different consequences’ (2003: 24). In tracking analyses of
whiteness towards a third wave,1 France Winddance Twine and Charles
Gallagher (2008) observe that research must address whiteness not as
a uniform category but as a series of contextual expressions (2008: 6).
‘Whiteness’ as a site of critical interrogation has its roots in the earliest
intellectual projects of black American scholars such as W. E. B DuBois,
who provided the foundations for this body of scholarship. The forma-
tion of white identities, ideologies and cultural practices that were used
to reinforce white supremacy was integral to DuBois’ work, wherein he
mapped the structural realities of racism and race relations within the
United States (The Philadelphia Negro, [1899] 2007). Whiteness Studies
as a focused field of inquiry, however, gained momentum in the 1990s
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 23

with the exponential growth of texts that examine the role whiteness
and white identities play in framing and reworking racial categories,
hierarchies and boundaries.
Such scholarship has examined and exposed the often invisible or
masked power relations within existing racial hierarchies (Twine &
Gallagher, 2008: 5) that allow whiteness to be cast as both a visible,
victimised identity (Bode, 2006; Gallagher, 2004; Wellman, 1993) and
have its power relations hidden, so as to allow its position as a benign
cultural signifier (Dyer, 1997). Third wave Whiteness Studies, building
on the existing research of the first and second waves of the 1990s
and 2000s, has taken as its analytical starting point the understanding
that whiteness is not, and never has been, a static or uniform cate-
gory of social identification (Roediger, 2005). In this way whiteness
emerges not as a hegemonic category, but as a multiplicity of identities
that are, for Twine and Gallagher, historically grounded, class specific,
politically manipulated and gendered social locations that ‘inhabit
local custom and national sentiments within the context of the new
“global village”’ (2008: 6). These ‘white inflections’ (Twine & Gallagher,
2008: 5), the nuanced and locally specific ways in which whiteness is
defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented, are thus crucial
to engaging with the whiteness of heavy metal, and furthermore the
multiple whitenesses it enfolds.
Studies of whiteness, and indeed the field of Whiteness Studies itself,
are not without criticisms. Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race
Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993), for example, offers a
framework for addressing the structuring mechanisms of whiteness. For
Frankenberg,

To speak of ‘the social construction of whiteness’ asserts that there are

locations, discourses and material relations to which the term ‘whiteness’
applies… whiteness refers to a set of locations that are historically, socially,
politically, and culturally produced and, moreover, are intrinsically linked
to unfolding relations of domination. (1993: 6)

Frankenberg’s framework has, however, invited criticisms—its ‘self-

satisfied moralism’(Ferrier, 2002: 122) can be seen to lend her writing
24 C. Hoad

a particularly self-serving tone, particularly when, as Aileen Moreton-

Robinson has pointed out in Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2009),
white feminist theorists’ approach to whiteness and white-race privi-
lege often fails to appreciate that ‘their position as situated knowers
within white race privilege is inextricably connected to the systematic
racism they criticise but do not experience’ (2009: xx). The capacity to
share information or interrogate one’s analysis can be easily made from
the location of privilege and power (Moreton-Robinson, 2009: 129).
Frankenberg tracks the perils of this herself (1993: 32–35), noting that
speaking about whiteness can often appear solipsistic and further the
trajectory of white intellectualism (c.f. Fine et al., 2004: xii).
Moving discussions of whiteness into the context of leisure spaces and
practices has necessitated a similar awareness of these criticisms. Karl
Spracklen in Whiteness and Leisure (2013a) acknowledges the potential
risks in applying critical whiteness theory to studies of leisure spaces,
noting that such endeavours may essentialise racial identities, or ‘recreate
hierarchies of belonging based on fixed ontological categories of ‘race’
or ethnicity’ (2013a: 1). Spracklen argues that whiteness is always being
constructed, challenged and redefined and that research should then
show how whiteness and constellations of whiteness and Otherness are
(re)produced in and through leisure, and how the problematic ontolog-
ical category of ‘race’ is implicated (2013a: 1). For Spracklen, leisure
is a form and space where inequalities of power are refracted through
social structures, and material and cultural power is at work making
constructions of whiteness unproblematic (2013a: 1).
Mapping how cultural spaces (re)produce and (de)problematise white-
ness must then be a key aspect of understanding how whiteness unfolds
within the texts of leisure consumption, such as music. Simon Frith
(Sound Effects, [1978] 1987) argues that popular music, and particularly
rock music, has always been violently embedded within the tensions of
black performance and white entertainment. The concept of entertain-
ment itself ‘has always been critical to the social relationships of blacks
and whites; rock musicians, in using black musical forms, were drawing
on particular conventions of emotional expression but also on an argu-
ment about leisure and freedom’ (1987: 22). For Frith, leisure is a site
that affords privilege, entertainment and relaxation only to white bodies
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 25

and allows blackness only to exist as a form of entertainment. From the

beginning of slavery, he claims, ‘entertainment’ was established as the
norm for black/white cultural relations (1987: 22). This matter of ‘black
life and death’ became a source of white relaxation, and this polemic
of white leisure and black servitude is situated within a wider racialist
discourse that casts white identity as the norm, and black bodies as spec-
tacles for entertainment (Frith, 1987: 22). Frith further argues that this
depreciation of black bodies casts black cultures as sites that could be
plundered for musical styles, which are subsequently stripped of their
blackness (1987: 23).
Frith’s appraisal points to the means through which the privileged
position of whiteness becomes naturalised within sites of leisure and
consumption. The problem of this understanding of whiteness is never-
theless fairly straightforward: rather than mapping the structural and
social privilege that informs whiteness, whiteness is oft-positioned as the
essential opposite to ‘blackness’. In response to the wider trend of treating
whiteness as the uncritiqued opposite of blackness, Twine and Gallagher
argue that analyses of whiteness must address cultural sites such as music
as ‘popular spaces where collective white identities are produced and
white identities normalised’ (2008: 15).
Frith’s focus on young white men as the key participants in leisure
spheres is not unique to his work. In scholarly discussions of music and
leisure white men have been largely interpellated and represented as the
default practitioners, producers and consumers (c.f. Driscoll, 2002). This
is particularly evident in academic approaches to music subcultures. The
institution to which Subcultural Studies owes its debt, the University
of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS),
produced work that affirmed the centrality of white masculinity within
musical sites and cultures. The Birmingham School’s otherwise vital
discussions of youth and youth cultures were characterised by a focus on
the cultures of young men (major examples include Clarke, 1973; Clarke
& Jefferson, 1973; Hebdige, [1974] 1979; Jefferson, 1973), thereby
shaping much of the subsequent discourse on subcultures to exclude
femininity.2 Race is further omitted in these studies and other exam-
ples from this period: Frith’s discussion of ‘girl culture’ (1987: 225) is
concerned with white ‘girls’ and does not map the intersections of gender
26 C. Hoad

and race for women in the same way that he (briefly) does for the male
music communities in his work. Hebdige proffers insights into a ‘white
ethnicity’ (1979: 65) asserted by punk subcultures in Britain, but again
often situates whiteness as the binary opposite of blackness.
Criticism of the CCCS’s conception of subculture has thus focused on
the narrowness of and exclusions inherent within these studies. Angela
McRobbie responds to the gender imbalance in traditional accounts of
subculture, noting that the masculinisation of subcultures means ‘the
style of a subculture is primarily that of its men’ ([1980] 2006: 60).
Furthermore, because subcultural research took as its subjects those who
were ‘other’ to capitalist hegemony, subcultures that did not conform to
its definitions were disparaged or ignored. Heavy metal in particular is a
clear casualty of the CCCS’s rigid conceptual framework for resistance;
as Andy R. Brown has noted, heavy metal was simply invisible to the
radar of subcultural theory (2003: 212).
In response to the exclusory and homogenising tendencies of the
CCCS’s subcultural model, researchers have looked to ‘scene’ as an alter-
native. Will Straw advocates for a use of the term to address ‘a cultural
space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each
other’ (1991: 373). Andy Bennett and Richard Peterson build upon
this to use ‘music scene’ to designate the contexts in which producers,
musicians and fans ‘collectively share their common musical tastes and
collectively distinguish themselves from others’ (2004: 1). ‘Scene’ is not
without its criticisms: David Hesmondhalgh sees the term as fundamen-
tally ambiguous (2005), while Mark Olson criticises Straw’s depiction
of scenes as ‘empty vessels’ (1998: 271). Olson instead frames scenes as
‘territorialising machines’ (1998: 281) which create and mobilise partic-
ular kinds of relationships in given contexts. ‘Scene’, in this way, is a
much more productive tool through which to understand practices in
specific spatial and temporal locations, where texts themselves are key
tools in enacting and sustaining this territorialisation.
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 27

Deconstructing the Default Metal Fan

Despite the academic turn to ‘scene’, loose theorisations of ‘subculture’
have been occasionally applied in conventional analyses of heavy metal.
Such uses are represented within a ‘wider public sphere’ (Bennett, 1999:
605) where disparate practices are collectively grouped together and
have hence created widely mediated discourses and images of default
heavy metal fans and practitioners. Dominant media representations of
metal fans and practitioners continue to centre on white men; Rosemary
Overell (2012) observes that media representations of metal fans have
historically been of ‘homologously deviant’ (2012: 28) young white men
with long hair, jeans and t-shirts. Spracklen notes the inherent whiteness
of heavy metal’s popular image thus:

[H]eavy metal remains in the West a strongly white musical subculture—

a music for white trash, played by white men with long hair and beards,
listened to by white folk who want to be associated with its faux-outlaw
status… It is sold by the industry as white music, and black musicians
playing metal have to work hard to be accepted as ‘true’ metallers. (2013a:
98)

Heavy metal’s commonly disseminated image is hence one of young

white men seeking deviance and rebellion. In the earliest scholarly
discussions of heavy metal culture, the whiteness of metal, and its polit-
ical significance therein, is near-absent in its articulation. Heavy metal
was largely neglected in early cultural studies of popular music; where
mentions of metal do appear, it is largely discussed in relation to class
dynamics. Willis’ brief mentions of heavy metal in Profane Culture
(1978) correlate it with the working-class ‘biker’ youth subculture, yet
the study makes minimal moves towards engaging with the gender or
racial politics of metal. Will Straw, in perhaps the earliest piece of
academic scholarship directly focused on metal, side-steps metal’s white-
ness by pointing to hostilities between disco audiences, who are racialised
as black and Hispanic (1984: 111) and metal audiences who, while
‘heavily male-dominated’ (1984: 115), receive no ethnic categorisation.
28 C. Hoad

Early moral-panic literature3 again presents white, male suburban

youths as the core audience for heavy metal. Tipper Gore, in Raising PG
Kids in an X-Rated Society (1987) argues that metal audiences largely
consist of adolescent ‘boys’ aged between 12 and 19; Carl Raschke
(Painted Black, 1990), argues that metal’s ‘prime listening audience’
consists of adolescents aged 13–18 (1990: 271) who form a ‘neural
bond’ (1990: 274) with the music, which he characterises as a ‘challenge
directly the values of Christian civilisation’ (1990: 281) and ‘aesthetic
terrorism’ (1990: 281). Gore and Raschke’s texts have not aged particu-
larly well, other than as moral panic novelties: both treat heavy metal
and its fans as homogeneous, and refuse to acknowledge the genre’s
dynamism and pluralism.
Such textual imaginings of metal scene members as long haired, young
white men nonetheless persisted well past Tipper Gore’s heyday. Jeffrey
Arnett’s book Metalheads (1996) characterises ‘the heavy metal subcul-
ture’ as ‘largely male’, where heavy metal ‘largely reflects them [young
men] and their concerns’ (1996: xi). Arnett notes that interviews were
undertaken with nearly twice as many men as women, where the 38
young women interviewed are discussed only in one chapter of the book.
The limited nature of Arnett’s sample goes beyond gendered lines: of
the nine fans he profiles in-depth, seven are white men, one is a white
woman, and one a black man. ‘Reggie’, a black teenager, is described as
‘not a typical metalhead’ by virtue of ‘his appearance’ and ‘not look[ing]
the part’ (1996: 111). A further example emerges in Donna Gaines’
Teenage Wasteland ([1990] 1998), wherein the text associates metal
fandom with the ‘crisis’ of youth culture under the Reagan adminis-
tration in the U.S. Gaines positions metal fans as angry white young
men—‘male white suburban teenagers’ (1998: 181)—and observes that
‘when the guys go to see Slayer, for the most part, the girls will stay
home’ (1998: 118). Gaines nevertheless makes observations towards the
political significance of metal’s whiteness—heavy metal is ‘the white-race
music of empire’ (1998: 180) and ‘white suburban soul music’ (1998:
181). The problems with such textual representations are nonetheless
largely the same as their predecessors: these texts offer no discussion
of fans external to North America, and ‘metalheads’ are defined as a
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 29

homogeneous group through appeals to their ostensibly shared, white

and heterosexual masculinity.
The positioning of the ‘default fan’ as a young, white, North Amer-
ican or Western European male is not unique to the early moral panic
literature surrounding heavy metal. Katharine Ellis, writing in 2009,
argues that ‘demographic research shows that the typical heavy metal
fan, almost worldwide, is male, white, aged around twelve to twenty-
two, and working class (or lower-middle class embracing a working class
ethos)’ (2009: 54). ‘Almost worldwide’ is a readily debatable quantifier
given the well-documented growth of heavy metal scenes worldwide.
Ellis further characterises the subculture as ‘young, white, heterosexual
male’ (2009: 54), drawn from an older observation by Deena Weinstein
([1991] 2000). Weinstein, in the foundational text Heavy Metal: The
Music and its Culture ([1991] 2000), argues that whiteness, alongside
youth, working-class identity and masculinity, forms a key demographic
factor in determining the structure of heavy metal as both a musical
style and subcultural site (2000: 102). Weinstein argues that metal is a
predominantly white genre (2000: 111), though the ways in which this
dominance is realised have exceeded the traditional boundaries of simple
demographics. As such, Weinstein makes an important move when she
observes that whiteness is not merely a demographic category, but has a
cultural significance within metal (Weinstein, 2000: 111).
Weinstein argues that the valorisation of ‘white’ in metal culture
emerged as both a response to the changing social position of people of
colour and the severing of certain white youths from ‘black’ music (2000:
112). Metal emerges concurrently with a desire to establish ‘roots’ for
whiteness in an Anglo-American context (Weinstein, 2000: 113). The
cultural significance of ‘white’ in metal, she then argues, may not be
overtly or necessarily covertly racist—it is less an affirmation of white-
ness than it is an ‘obtrusive absence’ of blackness (2000: 111). Weinstein
makes appeals to fanbases in Japan and Brazil (2000: 111), the growth
of Hispanic metal audiences within the United States (2000: 112–113),
and an account of a black fan who was nervous about attending a Rush
concert (2000: 112) to argue that metal is not racist ‘on principle’, but
rather ‘exclusivist’ in its insistence on upholding the ‘codes of its core
30 C. Hoad

membership’ (2000: 112). Such an approach however pays little atten-

tion to the possibility that such exclusivist codes may be almost entirely
an affirmation of whiteness—to argue that a genre which has, in her
own description, sought to sever associations with ‘black’ cultural forms
(2000: 112), is then simply coincidental in its whiteness oversimplifies
a complex dynamic. Discussing whiteness wholly in terms of the pres-
ence or absence of racism is reductive; furthermore, it allows a discussion
of whiteness to emerge only when it manifests in explicitly xenophobic
displays. Arguing that the white demographic base of metal has not been
given cultural expression as a racial value, ‘either in the pro-white or
anti-black sense’ (Weinstein, 2000: 113) ignores the affirmative site for
whiteness that heavy metal—and indeed the early literature surrounding
it—offers.
The scholarly understanding of whiteness as an absence of blackness is
thus the first, and most comprehensive, manifestation of whiteness that
I critique within the literature on heavy metal. Reducing discussions
of race in metal to black/white binaries is not an uncommon practice
within the academy. Robert Walser, in Running With the Devil: Power,
Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (1993), argues that the global
spread of metal means that scene members at large are no longer ‘over-
whelmingly white’ (1993: 17); but that heavy metal nonetheless remains
a ‘white-dominated discourse’ (1993: 17). Walser’s notion of metal as
a ‘white-dominated discourse’ is a significant observation that points to
whiteness and its embedded ideologies as a central structuring framework
for heavy metal culture, even as the genre continues to expand.
Walser’s assertion of the role of discourse in sustaining metal’s white-
ness remains a vital observation. Nevertheless, Walser parlays this into
a discussion of virtuosity and black/white musicological polemics, as
discussed later in this chapter. Such distinctions are also present within
literature focused on the development of extreme metal and its nuanced
subgenres, particularly death and black metal. Natalie Purcell (in Death
Metal Music, 2003) situates metallic whiteness in a black/white binary.
Purcell states that studies have found that metalheads are dispropor-
tionately white (2003: 105), a demographic statistic she attributes
to a combination of internet access and location (2003: 105). Where
Weinstein argues that ‘the heavy metal subculture is less a racially based
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 31

than cultural grouping’ (2000: 113), Purcell offers a similar appraisal of

metal’s demographic whiteness, arguing that it plays a role in providing
a community or family for young white men in a way that is, ostensibly,
otherwise denied to them by the musics of ‘minorities’ (2003: 106).
Purcell claims that heavy metal, in fostering identity and a sense of
community, operates for white youth in the same way that rap music
does for ‘blacks’ (2003: 106), who are represented as a homogeneous
group. White people are more drawn to metal, she argues, because
‘many minorities already have a scene and a community which appeals
to their need for brotherhood and shared identity’ (2003: 106), and
quotes a magazine article which declares metal music to be ‘Gangsta
Rap’s white-kid counterpart’ (2003: 106). Such approaches speak of the
significance of metal’s whiteness without really talking about whiteness
at all; instead such rhetoric situates whiteness as the opposite of black-
ness, or whiteness as occluded from the category of ‘colour’, enclosing
all ‘minorities’ within the non-white position of this binary, and talking
about race in ways that elude white bodies.
The idea of a community of whiteness realised through shared class
identities and ‘particular ethnic traditions’ (Weinstein, 2000: 113) treats
whiteness as unraced, a practice which is manifest within metal literature.
Keith Kahn-Harris, in Extreme Metal (2007), while offering an otherwise
nuanced and complex interrogation of the exclusionary mechanisms of
race and Otherness in extreme metal scenes, still largely broaches the
whiteness of metal through discussing the absence of people of colour.
Kahn-Harris notes that researchers have generally asserted that metal
fans are predominantly young, white working-class males (2007: 70).
He dismantles both the ‘young’ and ‘working class’ aspects of such claims
by noting that situations vary across the globe—for example, he argues
that in parts of Asia and the Middle East, scenes appear to be domi-
nated by the wealthy (2007: 70). Kahn-Harris also cautions against using
data that suggests metal is predominantly white, male, heterosexual and
working class and applying it indiscriminately to all genres (2007: 11),
noting the emerging (at that time) studies of metal in non-American
global contexts.
In discussing the ethnic makeup of the extreme metal scene, Kahn-
Harris points to the absence of ‘those of black African descent’ aside from
32 C. Hoad

‘a few’ black musicians in UK and US metal scenes, the ‘notable absence’

and ‘marginality’ of those of Chinese descent, and contends that ‘South
Asians both within the subcontinent and in diaspora communities are
also barely involved in extreme metal scenes’ (2007: 70). Kahn-Harris
suggests that in most places scene members come from the ranks of
majority groups (2007: 70), and goes on to contend that ‘the absence
of certain ethnic groups is also linked to overt prejudice’ (2007: 77), a
valid point that he discusses in relation to the anti-Semitism experienced
by Israeli scene members (2007: 25, 77, 152; see also ‘I hate this fucking
country’, 2002). Kahn-Harris however retrenches the white music/black
music polemic entrenched by extant texts, stating that ‘the lack of black
scene members has nothing to do with overt prejudice since few have ever
shown an interest in joining the scene’ (2007: 77) and further arguing
that ‘self-exclusion plays a role’ (2007: 77). There is nonetheless a posi-
tive outcome for Kahn-Harris’ work. Extreme Metal , unlike earlier texts,
establishes a framework for exploring scenes external to the ‘traditional’
centre of heavy metal; Kahn-Harris’ caution against applying data that
caters to particular geographic and cultural locales to all genres of metal
in all places demonstrates the need for research to approach heavy metal
scenes in reflexive and progressive ways.

Class, Masculine Transgression

and Individuality
Michelle Phillipov, in Death Metal and Music Criticism (2012), supports
Kahn-Harris’ call for reflexive research. She argues that the global growth
of metal means that the genre can no longer be considered ‘straightfor-
wardly white’ (2012: 66). Phillipov contends that global metal studies
disrupt the previous orthodoxies of metal studies which totalised the
genre as an expression of white working-class disenfranchisement (2012:
66). Phillipov’s appraisal informs the second manifestation of whiteness
that I critique within metal literature: understandings of whiteness as
expressions of Western working-class masculinity. Just as examinations of
whiteness within metal literature have largely hinged on the apparent
absence of people of colour, the correlation of whiteness with Western
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 33

working-class identity becomes a defining trend of metal studies.

Weinstein ([1991] 2000) (and Walser [1993], to an extent) accounts
for the demographic significance of white men in metal scenes through
explorations of deindustrialisation and blue-collar disenchantment (this
is also broached by Gaines, 1998, see also Hanaken & Wells, 1990:
62–63; 1993: 60, 66).
Class has long been central to discussions of heavy metal. Dick
Hebdige, in an earlier and disparaging critique, characterised metal as
inherently working class, a ‘curious blend of hippy aesthetics and football
terrace machismo’ that attracted aficionados ‘distinguished by their long
hair, denim and ‘idiot’ dancing’ (1979: 155). Class and deindustrialisa-
tion then become a key context for theorising heavy metal (Berger, 1999:
283), where metal is seen to provide a conduit for anger and frustration
experienced by blue-collar (white, male) workers, albeit solely in a US
and UK context. Phillipov observes that ‘the frustrations of blue-collar
life in a declining economy are considered a crucial context for metal’
and that most substantial analyses have focused on this issue (2012: 54).
Weinstein (2000) maintains that ‘blue collar’, alongside ‘male’, ‘youth’
and ‘white’, is a key structuring mechanism of heavy metal subcultures,
claiming that ‘heavy metal has a class signification wherever it appears’
(2000: 113).
Blue collar offers an ‘ethos’ that Weinstein argues has meaning and
affective qualities—‘Blue collar mythologies replace the romance of black
culture in metal’s syllabus of rebellion’ (2000: 114). Walser (1993) also
makes a point of articulating the working-class origins of heavy metal
(180n.7) but notes that (then) recent marketing studies had conflicting
findings concerning the ‘class’ and locale of the audience, which shifted
between heavy concentrations in ‘blue-collar industrial cities’ (1993: 16)
to ‘upscale family suburbs’ (1993: 17). Walser thus criticises Weinstein
([1991] 2000) for rarely moving beyond descriptions of the pleasures of
metal—‘musical ecstasy, pride in subcultural allegiance, male bonding’—
towards placing metal fans within political contexts that make such
pleasures possible (1993: 24). ‘Blue collar’ identity and its romantici-
sation take on a mythic quality that caters to narratives of ‘authentic’
masculinity, where metal and its ostensibly homosocial environments are
seen to provide an outlet for the frustrations of such an identity therein.
34 C. Hoad

Discussions of gender within heavy metal then hinge largely on the

representation of metal music and its fan community as male domi-
nated, and as later work has interrogated, dominated by particular
kinds of masculinity. Weinstein notes that the heavy metal audience
is ‘more than just male; it is masculinist […] the heavy metal subcul-
ture, as a community with shared values, norms and behaviours, highly
esteems masculinity’ (2000: 104). Masculinity in metal is understood as
the binary opposite of femininity, and it is perilous to even question,
let alone play with or breach, the boundaries (2000: 104). Weinstein
extends this observation to a brief discussion of the experiences of homo-
sexual men in metal (2000: 105–106) to point to the culture’s heteronor-
mativity. While important, such an observation only allows metal’s
sexual politics to be mapped within a heterosexual/homosexual binary
that serves only cisgendered men and excises the scope of LGBTQI+
identities. The dependence on such a dichotomy, as Amber Clifford-
Napoleone has argued (2015), has denied the pervasiveness of queer
identities and politics in the metal ethos and has limited scholarship on
gender and sexuality within metal scenes so as to retrench popular and
academic imaginings of metal as inherently masculine. For Weinstein,
however, the ‘boundaries’ of metal are wholly enclosed within the logic
of authentic masculinity/commercialised femininity. Weinstein goes on
to speculate whether such aggressive masculinity supports the strength
of patriarchy or is a defensive response to the ‘weakening’ of male hege-
mony (2000: 104), suggesting that ‘heavy metal music celebrates the very
qualities that boys must sacrifice [freedom, individuality, power] in order
to become adult members of society’ (2000: 105).
Such a reading of metal’s masculinist codes is not invalid; rather, it
is limited by an understanding of masculinity as an essentialist cate-
gory. Weinstein makes important connections between a culture of
masculinity and the construction of community—‘[the] male chau-
vinism and misogyny that characterise the metal subculture are tempered
by its sense of community’ (2000: 105)—but she does little to locate
the discourses and contexts that enable such performative masculinity.
Rather this research caters to an essentialist view that suggests masculinity
is automatically conferred upon male bodies in the same way, in all
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 35

contexts. The masculine space of heavy metal and its attendant authen-
ticity naturalises the presence of men within the scene, but exoticises
women. An initial example of this emerges within Weinstein’s analysis,
where she divides women between those who engage with metal ‘prop-
erly’ (i.e. in ways commensurate with masculine belonging) and those
who are seen to reiterate stereotypical ‘feminine’ behaviour (2000: 105).4
Further instances of such authentic masculine codes emerge in the
‘den mother’/‘band whore’ binary explored in Sonia Vasan’s work (2010),
and Gaines’ observation that male fans felt women pretended to like
metal to get attention (1998: 118). Another instance of this divisive
rhetoric occurs within Leigh Krenske and Jim McKay’s account of gender
relations in a Brisbane heavy metal club (2000). Krenske and McKay
found that the scene was largely male-dominated and defined through
masculinist codes. They subsequently categorise women into groups
whose distinctions are entirely based on their interactions with men
(2000: 295). By claiming that the few women who manage to ‘infiltrate
the scene’ succeed by ‘conforming to masculinist scripts’ (2000: 290),
Krenske and McKay suggest that such scripts are automatically conferred
upon men, who are not required to engage in the same performative
identity work. Similarly, this assertion ignores the salience of male perfor-
mativity in reproducing hegemonic gender narratives not only within the
space of the scene, but also external to it as well.
The notion that masculinist codes determine the behaviours of the
scene is an important one. However, rarely does such work of this period
offer critique of the fact that within their respective samples, it is always
(white, heterosexual) men who determine who is treated as an ‘equal’
and under what circumstances. Furthermore, such research can over-
look how men are granted these privileges, or the codes to which they
comply, while women are forced to prove themselves worthy of legitimate
belonging. Walser interrogates Western constructions of masculinity and
their enmeshment within heavy metal scenes, noting that heavy metal
often ‘stages fantasies of masculine virtuosity and control’ (1993: 108),
and that metal is, ‘inevitably, a discourse shaped by patriarchy’ (1993:
109). Walser offers a much more nuanced critique of the means through
36 C. Hoad

which gender is experienced within metal cultures, articulating the polit-

ical position of the young men who are seen to dominate the genre—
lacking in social, physical and economic power yet besieged by cultural
messages that insist upon such forms as vital attributes of masculinity
(1993: 109). Walser moves towards a post-structuralist critique, arguing
that sex and gender roles are social constructions rather than normative
biological functions, and that heavy metal offers a site for doing ‘iden-
tity work’ and ‘accomplishing gender’ (1993: 109). For Walser, ‘notions
of gender circulate in the texts, sounds, images and practices of heavy
metal, and fans experience confirmation and alteration of their gendered
identities through their involvement with it’ (1993: 109). Walser himself
notes that studies of metal that naturalise the position of (white) men do
a disservice to female fans (1993: 110)—nonetheless, he goes on to note
that ‘since the language and traditions have been developed by and are
still dominated by men, [his] discussion of gender in metal [is] initially
an investigation of masculinity’ (1993: 110).
Walser argues that hegemony is enmeshed within the structuring prac-
tices of heavy metal. He contends that the purpose of a genre is to
‘organise the reproduction of a particular ideology’ of white masculinity
(1993: 109), and for much of heavy metal’s history its generic cohesion
depended not only on the exscription of femininity from metal (1993:
11) but also upon the ‘desire of young white male performers and fans to
hear and believe in certain stories about the nature of masculinity’ (1993:
110). Walser urges researchers to further unpack these stories in critical
and analytical ways. Walser’s approach to gender is not without its faults.
While Walser criticises Weinstein for overlooking women’s responses to
metal as an attempt to ‘efface her own participation’ (as though her
participation is contingent upon her gender) (1993: 23), he does not
extend the same criticism to other researchers for the gender imbal-
ance in their work. Furthermore, he largely associates metal’s virtuosity
with men (1993: 57) and discusses women’s participation almost wholly
in relation to glam metal, and particularly glam metal fandom (1993:
132), furthering the association of girls with ostensibly commercialised
and superficial mass culture as opposed to more ‘authentic’ styles (1993:
130). Walser also echoes Weinstein’s argument that women gain power in
metal scenes through channelling masculine codes—he notes that he has
 2 Mapping Representation in Metal Music Studies 37

‘observed and interviewed female fans who dress, act and interpret just
like male fans’ (1993: 132), tacitly reinscribing male fans as the standard
bearer.
Literature which decries, exscribes and is suspicious of femininity
within metal scenes corresponds to, rather than critiques, the dominant
textual practices of heteronormative heavy metal cultures. This scholar-
ship represents a culture that prizes ‘acceptable’ modes of belonging—
masculine, heterosexual, white and powerful—yet uses discussions of
transgression and individual power as a foil. Beyond these discussions
of gender, more empowering approaches emerge within Kahn-Harris’
(2007) and Overell’s (2012) analyses of gendered engagement and indi-
vidual agency within scenes. Kahn-Harris argues that extreme metal’s
focus on transgression allows young women to exercise agency over their
own subcultural practices and thus access individual power. He then
introduces the term ‘transgressive subcultural capital’ (2007: 179) as a
scenic resource that offers women (amongst others) a chance to subvert
notions of mainstream gender performatives and therefore engage in a
transgressive act that enables a sense of self and empowerment—‘they
prefer aggressive music that nice girls do not listen to’ (2007: 76). ‘Nice
girls’ here however reiterates the same problem as the ‘resistance’ model
that often plagued the CCCS: situating women ‘outside’ metal within
such a category retrenches the compliant femininity/anti-authoritarian
masculinity binary and situates masculinity as the dominant code of
behaviour.
In response to such valorisations of anti-authoritarian masculinity,
Rosemary Overell (2012) introduces the term ‘brutal belonging’ to
capture an individual’s successful participation in a scene. In valuing
‘brutality’ (in Overell’s study, the term is shorthand for both a feeling
of affective intensity and a disavowal of commercialism, passivity and
conformity, see also ‘[I] hate girls and emo[tion]s’, 2013), such an
approach attempts to disassociate these qualities from any essential
masculinity, whiteness or heteronormativity. Instead, Overell’s ‘brutality’
places the onus on individuals’ capacity for and displays of affective
intensity. Overell notes that scenes are still permeated by manifesta-
tions of misogyny, racism and homophobia. ‘Brutal belonging’, however,
38 C. Hoad

allows for a more readily accessible model of subcultural capital accumu-

lation that does not depend on rigid somatotypes as a condition of entry,
but rather an individual’s capacity to prove themselves worthy of inclu-
sion within the scene. While Kahn-Harris’ and Overell’s approach situate
masculinist codes as the default norm that dictate scenic behaviours and
acceptability, they also offer means through which scene members who
would otherwise be marginalised have been able to exploit and critique
such codes to mark out their own scenic spaces.5
Despite these explorations of personal agency in relation to gender and
race in recent work, the legacy of metal’s dominant representations in
literature continues to have long-standing implications. Jeremy Wallach,
in recent work with Esther Clinton, has argued that musicians of colour
are central to the metal landscape (2015: 275), and that claims to any
racial homogeneity and racism within heavy metal ‘both magnifies the
problem and trivialises the experiences and dedication of the millions of
metalheads of colour’ (2015: 275). Wallach and Clinton rightfully argue
that conceiving of metal as universally white denies agency to people
of colour; nonetheless there remains work to be done in interrogating
the hostile global dialectic between people of colour, who are situated
as Others, and a musical culture that overwhelmingly understands and
defines its centre and origins within the white working class. Further-
more, research in this vein can further attend to the negative aspects
of a culture that stresses individual empowerment and personal agency,
often at the expense of collective efforts to confront bigotry and exclusory
politics.

Spectacular Whiteness and Racism

Understanding heavy metal as a site of free-thinking, free speech and
individual agency has the potential side effect of allowing metal scenes
to be more tolerant spaces for racism, sexism and homophobia (c.f.
Berger, 1999; Dawes, 2012). Harris Berger maps this struggle in Metal,
Rock and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience
(1999), noting that death metal scenes exercise a ‘radical tolerance’
(1999: 281) that creates tensions between what he sees as death metal’s
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
new cares that the dear baby brought with him, and owing to my
mother's ill-health. Oh, Thorley! I have so prayed that I might be kept
from doubting my mother, and I have sat down many a time to call
her loving words and ways to remembrance, until I have been able to
say to myself, 'No, it is impossible. My mother could never cease to
love me.' Grandmother could have ended all this with a word, yet
she saw me suffer and would not say it."

"She is very old, dear Miss Meg. She has had her own way always,
and gone just in one rut through such a long life. I do believe she
thinks she has a right to do these things. If they troubled her
conscience, she would never rest, and she does sleep as sound as a
healthy baby. She is a wonderful old lady."

"She cannot think that deceit is right. I have asked her so often, and
she has declared that she did not know where my mother was."

"And perhaps she told the truth. It would be just like your
grandmother to keep all those letters unopened, or to burn them
without reading a word, so that she could say truly that she did not
know."

"She will have to give an answer about them now," said Margaretta
firmly.

"Dear Miss Meg, do consider her age. You know about your mamma
now, and where will be the use of upsetting the old lady by saying
anything? Beside, she is getting fond of you, and talks quite proudly
when your back is turned about your pretty singing. Try and keep in
with her, dear Miss Meg. It may mean a great deal to you some day."

But Meg was not to be moved from her purpose. "I will wait until
grandmother has breakfasted, and then I will see her. Not all the
wealth in the world would tempt me to be silent now."

"Think about it, dear, whilst you get your breakfast, or wait till to-
morrow. It is a good thing to sleep on a matter when you are inclined
to be angry."
"As to breakfast, I feel as though I could never take another mouthful
in this house," replied Margaretta. "I cannot wait to sleep over the
matter. I will spend my time in praying that I may not speak angrily,
or forget the respect I owe to one who is my relative, and so old. I
hope God will help me to be patient, but speak I must."

Margaretta accordingly entered Lady Longridge's room, as Thorley

left it with the breakfast-tray.

The old lady greeted her more kindly than usual. She was in high
good humour at receiving extra interest on an investment, but did not
mention this to her granddaughter.

"Grandmother," said the girl, "I wish to speak to you about my

mother. I have had a letter from her. It came into my hands in an
unusual manner—you must not ask me how, for I cannot tell any
more than this, that the post-bag was not meddled with, and that no
one has disobeyed you in any way."

"There has been trickery!" cried Lady Longridge. "Tell me this instant.
Give me the letter. You have no right to receive one unknown to me,
your lawful guardian."

"I would not; I never have done from anyone else; but this is
different, being from my mother."

"It is not. She was to see you once in six months, and seeing that
your father had so willed it, she would not try to alter the conditions,
though they pinched her, and I was glad of it. She has not come near
you; there was nothing about letter-writing in Philip's will. I had the
right to keep the letters!" cried the old lady, triumphantly.

"My mother could not come. She had been ill, but she wrote and
wrote, and I waited, my heart aching with dread, as you know; but all
in vain. Oh, grandmother, you knew, and you did not tell me! Even
now you are glad to think of our suffering."
"No. Not yours. It was hers I spoke about," interrupted Lady
Longridge.

"Well, hers, then. Did you never think what my mother must feel
when not a word of answer reached her? And you are getting so old
—forgive me for saying it; and surely if there has been ill-will
between you and mother, it is time to forgive one another, and be
friends."

"Friends with Florence! Never! And I have told the truth. I never
opened one of her letters, so that I might say that I knew nothing,
and tell no falsehood. The letters are there to prove it."

"Let me have them, grandmother. Do give them to me!" pleaded the

girl.

"Take them, if you like, but take them somewhere else, and do not let
me see your face again. I had meant to do something for you, but
now you shall not have a penny of mine. I will burn my white will to-
day, and send for Melville about the blue one."

"The letters, grandmother, please, the letters!"

"You shall have them. They will pay you well for what this affair will
lose you. Take this key. In that little drawer are the letters unopened.
Mind, you choose between those and more than you know of."

Without hesitation Margaretta took the key, emptied the little drawer
of its contents, and then returned it to Lady Longridge, who said,
"Get out of my sight, and do not trouble me again!"

"Good-bye, grandmother. I am sorry you are angry, but I could not

help speaking. I forgive you. You have been hard sometimes, but I
shall try to forget the pain you have caused me about my dear
mother. I am glad I can forgive, or I should not dare to ask that my
trespasses might be forgiven. Thank you for having me taught by
dear Mrs. Moffat."
"Go!" screamed the old lady. "Go, and do not preach to me. I never
wish to see you again."

The girl turned a look of the deepest pity on that old face, distorted
with anger, and closing the door behind her went to her own room.

CHAPTER VII.
WHICH SHALL IT BE? BLUE OR WHITE?

ONE thought above all others was in Margaretta's mind. She would
leave Northbrook Hall at once and for ever. But where should she
go?

She bethought herself of that old promise, and without waiting even
to change her simple wrapper for a walking dress, she gathered up
her precious letters, threw a soft woollen shawl round her, put on her
hat, and went rapidly towards the little dwelling tenanted by Nelly
Corry and her mother. As she passed through the ill-kept
conservatory she plucked a rose from a bush that had been a
favourite of her mother's, and which she had tended with loving
hands.

She had tasted nothing since early on the preceding evening, and
when she reached the cottage she was faint with want of food and
excitement, for it was getting towards noon.

Nelly was in the midst of her dressmaking, but at the sight of

Margaretta, she deposited her work on the seat she was occupying,
drew forward an old wicker chair, the most comfortable one in the
place, and begged her visitor to sit down. Then she removed her hat
with gentle hands, and, quite alarmed at Margaretta's woe-begone
appearance, asked what was the matter and what she could do for
her.

The girl could not answer, but to Nelly's dismay she burst into a
passion of hysterical weeping.

Nelly strove to soothe her with loving words, and wished that her
mother would come, for Mrs. Corry being a little better than usual
had gone to do the shopping of the tiny household.

Soothed and calmed at last, Margaretta told her tale to her humble
friend, and concluded by saying, "I have come to you, Nelly. I have
kept my promise. I have scarcely any money, for Mrs. Moffat has my
last sovereign, and I forgot to mention it before she left."
"Don't name money, dear Miss Meg. I am not without a trifle, and
there is Thorley with plenty, who would do anything for you. I will get
you a cup of tea and something with it. Then you will be better, for
you are faint for want of it."

Nelly busied herself in preparing the tea, and poor Meg thankfully
partook of it, and then read, one by one, all the letters written by that
dear hand, and now first opened by her own. From them she
gathered all the details of her mother's illness and journeyings to and
fro, of the tender cares by which she was surrounded; and she read,
with tear-moistened eyes, how that dear parent was ever looking
forward to meeting her again, and to the time when no one would be
able to separate them from each other. In more than one letter
money was enclosed, so that Margaretta found she would need no
help of this kind.

As she closed the last precious letter she felt more tenderly towards
her grandmother. "At least," thought she, "I have been able to read
my dear mother's words of love. She might have read them herself
and then burned them."

Old Lady Longridge was truly a strange mixture. Too vindictive to

give up her daughter-in-law's letters, yet impelled by a certain sense
of honour to refrain from reading words only meant for the eyes of
her granddaughter, and determined that in saying she knew nothing
of Mrs. Norland's movements, the statement should be true.

Thorley had a trying time with her old mistress that day. She found
out that Margaretta had left the Hall, but that she had carried nothing
away with her, so rightly judged that she had taken refuge at Nelly
Corry's. She had no chance of following her thither, for Lady
Longridge kept her constantly in sight, and, contrary to custom,
remained in her own room all the day.

"I am not well enough to go down," she said. "That girl has upset me
with her talk about forgiving. As if I, an old woman of eighty-three,
now would ask her pardon. And to talk of Florence! I never could
bear the woman! Daughters-in-law and daughters are all alike—at
any rate mine were. They cared for themselves, and left me to shift
for myself. I am getting old. The girl told the truth there, and
somebody must have the money. If I could make a new will—but
Melville is away, and I will trust nobody else. He is weak; he wanted
me to leave money to my daughters, who had their share long since;
but he is true, and can keep his own counsel and my secrets. I wish
—"

But the voice became tremulous and quavering, and for a time Lady
Longridge ceased to think aloud, and slept in her easy-chair by the
fire, while Thorley watched in silence, afraid to move, lest she should
arouse her mistress.

Lady Longridge awoke refreshed, but asked no questions about

Margaretta. She, however, later in the day gave Thorley the key of a
safe which occupied a corner of her bedroom and stood confessed
as such, without an attempt at concealment.

"Get out two papers for me," she said. "They are in large envelopes
—one blue, the other white, and both are marked alike, 'The last Will
and Testament of Dame Sophia Janet Longridge.'"

Thorley obeyed, and placed them by her side.

"Now undress me. I am tired, and will go to bed," said her mistress;
and as soon as her head touched the pillow she said, "Give me my
two last wills."

Clutching them tightly in her hand, Lady Longridge again began to

murmur to herself—

"The girl is a fine girl. She kept her temper better than I could have
done. Perhaps I have been hard; but it was Florence I disliked. She
would have turned me out of Northbrook, but she had to leave me
here at last. I always said I would live and die here, and I shall. I am
just a little glad the girl forgave me." Another pause. "I seem to see
differently to-day. I could almost see Florence if she came now.
Thorley, where is my granddaughter? Call her."
But Thorley knew she should call in vain, so she said she would
send and seek Miss Longridge, who was out somewhere.

"I wonder will she come in time?"

The words dropped more slowly from Lady Longridge's lips, and
there was a look in her face that startled Thorley. But once again she
spoke with comparative firmness, and the maid thought that her
mistress was battling against the drowsiness which was stealing
over her, and had made her so slow of utterance.

"I think Thorley shall settle it," she said. "I can take her opinion first
and act on it. Then if I like I can burn the other 'last will,' and let them
fight over the old woman's money."

Addressing her maid, she continued, "Here are two wills. This blue
one leaves much to you, little to Margaretta. The white, much to her,
little to you. Both cannot stand; which shall I burn?"

"Dear madam, burn the blue one!" cried the unselfish creature, true
to her love for dear Miss Meg. "Let the money go to your own flesh
and blood. I do not want it; I have saved what will serve my time, and
I shall be happy in seeing Miss Margaretta have it when you can
enjoy it no longer."

"Here, then, burn the blue one," and Lady Longridge relinquished her
hold of it. Thorley first tore it across, and then pushing it into the
midst of the fire saw it consumed to the last morsel.

"I almost wish you had burned the other," said her mistress. "You are
so unselfish you deserve the money; not that it has made me happy.
Margaretta is a long time in coming, and I must go to sleep. Say
'good-night' for me. I think you have made me feel as if I wanted to
forgive everybody. After all, blood is thicker than water."

Thorley heard unwonted words from the aged lips—"Forgive us our

trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." Then a
murmur only, then sleep.
The message sent by Thorley was the means of bringing Margaretta
back to the Hall, though she had never intended to return thither. But
a talk with her humble little friend Nelly had so softened the heart,
that when summoned she was ready to go with the messenger. On
tiptoe she entered Lady Longridge's room and crept to the bedside,
accompanied by Thorley, who bent over her mistress to listen.

There was no sound of breathing, no sign of life. Those murmured

words had been her last, and in her hand, though the grasp on it had
relaxed, lay the white will, truly the last will and testament of Dame
Sophia Janet Longridge, the contents of which made Margaretta her
heiress and owner of wealth far beyond what those who thought they
knew had counted on her leaving behind.

The succession of shocks was too great for the girl to bear, and for
the first time in her life she fainted by the side of the bed whereon lay
all that remained of her whose rule had been so long and so
despotic.

It was a great and unforeseen blessing that Mrs. Moffat returned that
night sooner than she intended, and that on her way to Clough
Cottage she stopped to leave a message for Nelly Corry. From her
she heard of Margaretta's flight from the Hall and the summons
back, and without hesitating, she ordered her coachman to drive
straight to Northbrook, where her presence gave the greatest
possible comfort.

Clasped in her kind arms, Margaretta sobbed out her story, and
received the best consolation she could have, until, only a couple of
days later, she found herself in those of her mother. Mr. and Mrs.
Norland had taken a shorter route home than they at first planned, to
avoid a district in which there had been cases of cholera; and on
reaching England saw the announcement of Lady Longridge's death
in the "Times," so hastened to Northbrook.

No more separations to look forward to. Mother and daughter were

united, with no fear of being snatched from each other. Lady
Longridge would have wondered, if with mortal eyes she could have
seen honest tears falling from those of her daughter-in-law. But the
account of those last words, the fact that the old lady had left her
wealth to Margaretta, as if to make amends for past harshness, the
memory of the sick-bed from which, by God's goodness, she had
been raised to renewed health, and perhaps the knowledge that she
herself might have been more forbearing, all combined to produce
softened feelings in her mind. She was very glad of those words
which Thorley repeated in a voice broken by sobs, "You have made
me feel as if I wanted to forgive everybody," and the divinely-taught
prayer which followed, and which Mrs. Hugh Norland herself said
that night as she had never said it before.

No one knew what Thorley had done, or by what a noble act of self-
sacrifice she had secured the inheritance for her dear Miss Meg.

They are not parted, for though Thorley at first thought she would
have a little home of her own, the tears of her darling induced her to
forego her resolution. The same roof covers them, and she who
might have inherited Lady Longridge's wealth waits upon the
heiress, and is well contented with the legacy which came to her, or
indeed would have been content without it.

Margaretta is doubly happy in her present home, for her stepfather is

good and wise, and regards her as a sacred charge from his old
friend, because she is Sir Philip Longridge's daughter. The girl finds
endless pleasure in the little boy who calls her "Sister Meg," and
tyrannises over her in baby fashion.

Mrs. Moffat has left Clough Cottage, and resides near the Norlands,
so Margaretta, long deprived of her mother's presence, now declares
she has two mammas.

Little Nelly Corry's deft fingers are often employed on dear Miss
Meg's gowns still, for she, too, has left the neighbourhood of
Northbrook Hall, and has a better and prettier home with her mother,
rent free, on Mr. Norland's estate.
So we will leave Margaretta, loved and cared for, amid surroundings
suitable to her present fortunes, and finding happiness in giving it to
others. A holiday story hers is, without a holiday or a hero. But she is
young yet, and abundantly contented. Her hero will come in time,
and if I happen to know him, I will tell you when a love story begins
with dear Miss Meg for its heroine.
 A TALE OF A PENNY

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

"Do be quiet, Jack. I wonder who can read, write, or think, with any
hope of satisfactory results, whilst you are turning everything topsy-
turvy and rummaging round in such a fashion. What restless plagues
lads are, to be sure!"

"And all because a penny is lost, stolen, strayed, or otherwise

mislaid. I am sure it is not worth all that fuss," said sister number two,
while the young gentleman addressed, no ways affected, continued
his search for the missing coin.

There were just the three of them in a cosy room, one of those
universally useful apartments which are not too grand for working,
studying, or playing in, as the case may be, but in which mothers
and their young folk love to congregate. Florence, mostly called
Flossie, on account of her lovely hair, which was just one mass of
silken locks, was the eldest, and a girl of sixteen. She was generally
considered "a little bit blue," being a hard worker at her books, and
great in various branches of study unknown to girls when our
mothers were at school.

One of the teachers had been heard to call Flossie the prop of her
class; whereupon Master Jack, who was very fond of having a sly
poke at girls in general, and his sisters in particular, said he had
never known such an appropriate name for anybody.

"Floss is not only a prop but a perfect clothes-prop in every position,"

he said, in allusion to his sister's height, slimness, and length of limb.

At this moment Flossie was studying for an "exam." And, though

very fond of her young brother, she did not like to be interrupted by
Jack's "rampage" for his lost penny.

Madge, the second girl, though nearly two years younger, was a
born housewife; full of motherly instincts, and doting on little children.
She was still a child, despite those graver employments and
abstruse studies which are supposed to promote the higher
education of women in these enlightened days. She had been a doll-
worshipper always, and now, at more than fourteen years of age,
was the happy possessor of an immense family in wax, wood, cloth,
and porcelain. Amongst these she was as busy as was Flossie at
her books—furbishing up the whole lot, washing faces, repairing
garments, tidying dishevelled locks, and otherwise making the
multitude of dolls fit to be seen. Madge had brought down a doll's
house, relegated a year before to the garret, and was setting it in
order for the amusement of some very small cousins who were
expected on the following day.

At first Jack had been helping Madge, but the loss of that precious
penny—and a new one, too—had diverted his attention, and in the
search for it, he had upset chairs, unmade beds, brought down
miniature pictures, to the destruction of those works of art, and
brought down upon himself, in addition, the wrath of his younger
sister and playmate.

It was amusing to see how the ten-year-old lad's nature seemed

compounded of the very opposite characteristics of the girls. At
lesson time, he plodded away beside Flossie, who helped him with
his declensions, gave him almost too-learned lectures on the
beauties of Euclid, and piloted him tenderly across the Pons
Asinorum.
At playtime, he entered into Madge's pursuits, believed in the reality
of doll families and all their joys and sorrows. He even assisted at
their toilettes by dressing the boy juveniles, propriety being duly
considered, though under the roof of a doll's house. Madge was
playfellow, sister, friend, little mother and comforter to Jack from and
before the time he could toddle. Her great grief in those early days
was that he would grow, and often was she heard to say, when
remarking his progress upwards, "Oh, mamma, won't it be a pity
when Jack is grown out of a baby!" He being the youngest of the
family, and consequently the darling of all.

Father and mother both rejoiced in the close union among the
children, which helped, especially in Madge's case, to keep the girls
young—alas! A very difficult matter in these high-pressure days. And
Jack had a good deal of quiet humour for a lad of his age. He
professed to read Madge like a book, and declared that she made
the coming of the little visitors an excuse to have a turn at the dolls,
of which she was as fond as ever; moreover, that she still nursed
them on the quiet, and caressed them with all the old tenderness
when nobody was by, though in company she tried to look as grown-
up as dear old Floss, who was, in many ways, nearly as old as
Methuselah and as wise as Solomon.

An extra crash amongst the small furniture, and a half-penitent

apology from Jack, and then Madge began to scold in earnest.

"I declare, you bad boy, you have undone nearly an afternoon's
work, and done many a pennyworth of damage. I'll bring an action
against you, Jack, and mamma shall be judge. And here's the
porcelain doll that I called after you, and you were pretending to
wash, left at the bottom of the bath. Of course it's drowned, for no
person could be ten minutes face downwards and under water
without being finished off. However, the little ones can play at
burying him to-morrow—that's something."

This was too much even for Flossie's gravity. She and Jack burst into
a fit of laughing at the idea of the drowned doll and funeral in
prospective, in which Madge joined a moment after, despite her
endeavours to look aggrieved at the sad consequences of Jack's
negligence.

In removing the tin bath Madge discovered the new penny

underneath it, and then Jack remembered that he had put it there
himself for safety, because both his pockets were in an unsafe
condition.

"And no wonder, Jack, considering the loads and loads of rubbish

you put in. One of your jackets came from the cleaner's only
yesterday, and mamma says it smells oily yet, and all through your
carrying lumps of putty in it for weeks together."

Jack pulled a long face, and held out his hand for the recovered coin,
which Madge at first refused to deliver up.

"Give me a kiss for it, and say you're sorry for all the fuss and the
mischief you have caused," said she.

Madge held out her rosy lip; Jack drew back, shrugged his
shoulders, and looked as if he were going to perform an act of
penance. He gave the pretty lips a very rapid salute, snatched the
coin from Madge, then pulled a wry face and polished his own mouth
on the cuff of his coat.

"Is it such a terrible dose, Jack?" asked Madge, with just a suspicion
of moisture in the corner of her eye, for she could not bear the young
rebel even to pretend anything unloving towards her.

For answer she received a hug that would have been a credit to a
Greenland bear, and quite a little shower of kisses from the boy, who
added, "You knew it was only for fun, Madge. I would not vex you,
dear." And she did, know it.

At this moment mamma came in.

"My dear children, what an untidy room! What! Up to the eyes in

dolls and dolls' belongings, Madge. I suppose you are preparing for
the small cousins. But I thought by this time the whole establishment
would be in order. Flossie, how have you gone on working amid such
a racket? What has it been about?"

"Jack's new penny. He lost it, and would not be pacified until at
length it was discovered—but not without enough fuss and turmoil to
make the room in this state—in the very place where he had himself
put it. I offered him another, two others, but nothing save the
particular penny would do. As if the loss of a penny were of any
consequence."

"It is of consequence," said Jack. "I did not want to lose it. I never
like to lose anything, if taking a little trouble will find it. Besides, I
don't believe in being beaten when I know the thing must be
somewhere about, so I was determined not to give in, until I got my
penny back again."

"Right, Jack," said mamma, "and I am very glad your perseverance

was rewarded by its recovery. Still, you had no occasion to make the
whole room and its contents look as though the place was the scene
of a recent earthquake. Flossie, dear, how have you managed to
move your elbows? You might be besieged. Let me say to you, dear,
also, never undervalue a penny. I once heard a story which told how
the future of two lives hung on a single penny."

Flossie's book was closed, and her pen wiped and put away in a
moment.

"I have just finished my work, mamma, and am longing for a chat
with you by the fireside. Tell us the story about the penny. Do, there's
a darling."

Mamma's cosy chair was drawn forward, and a little fireside circle
formed instanter. But mamma protested that she never could tell a
story in the midst of a litter, so Madge and Jack began to clear away
with great rapidity. The girl, who was naturally methodical, put things
in their places; the boy made bad worse by the unceremonious
fashion in which he huddled the dolls, their clothing and furniture into
the miniature mansion, and closed the door upon them.

In her eagerness to hear her mother's story Madge forgot to find fault
with Jack, and soon the girls were seated at each side of the family
tale-teller, and the lad stretched on the rug at her feet, his upturned,
intelligent face lighted by the blaze of the cheerful fire, gas having
been vetoed by unanimous consent.

CHAPTER II.

TWENTY years ago two girls might have been seen approaching a
London railway-station. They had evidently been on a shopping
expedition, for they were quite laden with numbers of small parcels,
besides which they had one of considerable bulk, though not very
weighty. A glance at their fine, fresh faces and the lovely colour on
their cheeks suggested the idea that they were country girls on a
visit to the metropolis. Indeed, few persons could have met these
girls without giving them a second glance. One, the elder by several
years, was unusually tall; but her carriage was equally remarkable
for grace and dignity, and her features for almost faultless regularity.
No wonder that she attracted some attention amongst the many
passers-by.

The younger, a girl of eighteen, was also above the middle height,
and although not a beauty like her sister, her face just possessed the
charm which was lacking in the other. It beamed with intelligence,
and seemed to be the reflection of an active mind, a cheerful temper,
and a warm, loving heart.
Even as they passed along, the unselfish character of the younger
was made manifest. She insisted on carrying the larger share of the
parcels, notably the largest of all, which was evidently a source of
considerable annoyance to her beautiful companion, who plainly
deemed these packages infra dig. Though surrounded by strangers,
she glanced round from time to time, to see if, by any chance, some
acquaintance were noticing her, and carried such parcels as she
retained by their loops of string and on the tips of her fingers, as if
under constant protest.

As they were nearing the station the elder girl said, "I am so glad we
are getting near the end of our tramp. You, Lizzie, scarcely seem to
care how many bundles you have about you, if you can only carry
them; but I hate to go along laden just like a pack-horse, and on a
warm day, too. This hot weather makes me look like a
washerwoman."

"It would take a great deal to make you look like a washerwoman,
Edith," replied Lizzie, with a merry laugh. "I never saw you look
better than you do at this moment. I get as red as a peony all over
my face, and you are only rose-coloured, and in the proper places.
Do touch my face with your handkerchief; for mine is deep down in
one of my many pockets, each of which is crammed with odds and
ends of purchases."

Mollified by this tribute to her personal appearance, Edith did as she

was requested, and the girls, finding they had a quarter of an hour to
spare, seated themselves on a shady seat at one side of the
platform, on which Lizzie also placed her larger parcels; seeming
thankful for the rest.

They were not going home together after all. They were guests in the
same house; but they had other friends in the neighbourhood
besides those with whom they were staying. Edith, especially, had
many acquaintances, amongst whom she had often visited when in
London on former occasions, and she was going to spend the
evening with an old schoolfellow recently married.
Lizzie, in London for the first time; was a stranger to this married
friend of her sister. She had been invited to accompany Edith; but
had declined, because had she gone she must have disappointed
some quite little children, to whom she considered herself engaged.

"You might have gone with me, Lizzie," said Edith, in a tone of
annoyance. "Just as though it mattered for you to romp with those
little cousins to-night."

"I had promised the children before Mrs. Martin's invitation came,
and these little people feel a disappointment far more than elder
ones do. Besides, I know your friend does not really want me, and
Sam and Nellie do. She only asked me out of civility to you, and you
will enjoy your confab a great deal better by yourselves. Even if Mrs.
Martin did want me, a promise is a promise, and I must keep my
word."

A slight look of contempt crossed Edith's fair face as Lizzie

announced her intention of keeping her appointment with the little
people, but she felt that, after all, her frank young sister might be
rather in the way than otherwise, on the principle that two are
company, three none. She was rather reckoning on an hour's tête-à-
tête with Mrs. Martin, who had been her chosen school friend, and
as whose bridesmaid she had officiated a few months before. Mr.
Martin and his brother would be in to dinner at six, and then there
would be two couples for chatting, and perhaps a stroll together,
before she should have to return to her temporary home, and rejoin
Lizzie there.

Edith did not say aloud what was passing through her mind. Her
reply was, "Of course you cannot go with me now, as you have not
dressed for the purpose, and I was certain you would go back to
those children in any case. But you will have to take every one of the
parcels and my umbrella. It will not matter, as you take the train
directly, and you can have a cab from the station."

"Oh no, I can manage very well. But, Edith, you forget. I have no
money left. You must give me some."
"And I have very little; only five and sixpence. I cannot go to Mrs.
Martin's without anything in my pocket. If you had not persisted in
buying that Shetland shawl to-day we should have had plenty and to
spare, and if you had let the shop people send it, we need not have
gone about laden like two excursionists."

"We are excursionists," laughed Lizzie. "Haven't we got special

tickets for this very trip? As to the shawl, it was so exactly what
mamma has been trying to obtain, that I felt we ought not to risk
losing it. I care nothing about carrying it, for though it makes rather a
large parcel, it is very light, and I shall have the pleasure of
forwarding it to mamma at once. Besides, Edith, you bought several
little things for yourself after I had spoken for the shawl."

Lizzie felt just a little bit hurt at her sister's reproof, for Edith's
purchases, which had nearly drained her purse, were all for her own
personal adornment, and helped very considerably to increase the
load which she declined to share. The shawl would add greatly to the
comfort of their rather delicate mother, who needed one which would
combine warmth with extreme lightness, and who had begged the
girls to send one from London with as little delay as possible.

Edith insisted that in such roasting hot weather, the shawl could not
be of any consequence. Lizzie's great desire was to execute her
mother's commission, and to keep her promise.

Again the girl reminded her elder sister of her own moneyless
condition. "However the cash has gone, Edith, it is gone, and I
suppose the railway people will not give me a ticket for nothing. You
must spare me something in the shape of a coin. I will do with as
little as possible. I can pay the cabman from my money at home."

"The fare is only fourpence," said Edith, taking out her purse and
abstracting the only small coin in it. "I suppose this sixpence will do.
By the bye, it is my train that goes at the quarter; yours is at the half-
hour, so you will have to wait by yourself."