heavy metal and gender essays

heavy metal and gender essays Year/Major: 3rd Year. Film, TV, and Media Studies. Question: Choose one popular music genre and analyze with respect to race, gender OR class. Analysis Of Heavy Metal With Respect To Gender. Heavy Metal music usually include impressive technical feats on the electric guitar, counter posed with an experience of power and control that is built up through vocal, guitar power chords, distortion, and sheer volume of drums. Also Visually, metal musicians typically appear as males, leaping about the stage, leather clothing punctuating their performances with phallic thrusts of guitars and microphone stands. Heavy metal is, a discourse shaped by patriarchy. Circulating in context of Western society, for much of its history metal has been appreciated and supported primarily by a male teenage audience. This is a group lacking in social, physical, and economical power but besieged by cultural messages promoting such forms of power, insisting on them as masculinity. The purpose of a genre is to reproduce a particular ideology, and the aim of heavy metal until mid 1980s was for young white male performers and fans to hear and believe in certain stories about the nature of masculinity. However these representations can never be definitive and they are always open to transformation and changing figures. Since social circumstances may change so that particular forms of culture are no longer related to an individual. For example metal fans as they get older may gain some amount of economical power, or they may find children who replace them at the bottom of social or physical power. Also we have seen a great increase in number female fans, since around 1987, concert audiences for metal shows have been roughly gender balanced . In my discussion I will try to explain why metal has been dominated by male musicians and fans, also why there was a big increase in the number of female fans. I will be framing heavy metal songs and videos in terms ...