Heavy Metal Music in Argentina: In Black We Are Seen

An in-depth regional discussion of heavy metal music, Heavy Metal Music in Argentina explores metal music as a catalyst for social change and site for engaging political reflection. Originally published in Spanish and sold locally in Argentina, this is the first time the work has been available in English.  

Edited by leading researchers, this collection addresses the music’s rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics and allows readers to rethink the place of heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship, the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina.

This is the first collection of essays on Argentine metal music. It has opened up research channels between different universities in the country while also engaging a non-academic audience, and widening the potential market for the book.

The book makes an interdisciplinary examination of a complex and fascinating object: it allows for the examination, discussion and analysis of its nationalist postulates, relationship with the Creole culture (for example, with nineteenth-century ‘gauchesca’ literature), indigenism, and with the political processes of contemporary Argentina.

Metal Music Studies, as an academic area of inquiry, has focused mostly on the music’s cultural components in Europe and the United States. The few books that have addressed metal music as a global phenomenon, have severely neglected the inclusion of Latin American countries. Argentina, with the largest and oldest metal scene in the region, has also been neglected in the existing literature. There is a growing interest in this area, as demonstrated by the emergence of documentary film on metal music in Latin America.

The book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and Latin American studies.  It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789383010

Book preview

Introduction: A Window into Heavy Metal Scholarship in the Global South

Nelson Varas-Díaz, Daniel Nevárez Araujo, and Emiliano Scaricaciottoli

Tengo en las venas una sangre y una queja que está latente y no es azul Tengo en mis venas sangre fuerte metalera/Y una esperanza, la del sur.

(‘Venas de Acero’, Tren Loco 2008)

Introducing this book to readers like you calls for a different approach. Editors usually concentrate on the contents of the book, highlight particular chapters, and describe its overall contributions to a field of knowledge. Doing so in this manner, and for this particular book, feels like a disservice to the underlying story that gave birth to this body of work. In this case, we feel a distinctive approach is needed because the story of how this book came into existence and what it could mean for those who were unaware of its initial publication, hopefully until now, are probably just as important as its content. Therefore, with the leniency of the readers, we wish to take a different path in this introductory note. We will do so by concentrating on the group of authors that brought this work to bear, the context in which it was developed, and what we feel it means to heavy metal music scholarship.

Let us begin with the authors of the book, or rather, the collective of individuals that have brought it to light. The chapters in this book were written by members of the Grupo de Investigación Interdisciplinaria sobre el Heavy Metal Argentino (GIIHMA), or the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal. The GIIHMA is a collective of metal fans, scholars, and activists who have engaged in a joint effort to reflect on the development and permanence of heavy metal culture in their particular country. Their endeavor is specifically important for several reasons. First, they are one of the first scholarly collectives to engage in heavy metal related scholarship in South America. This fact alone is important, as research on heavy metal music has met resistance in many academic settings in the Latin American region. Therefore, it is not coincidental that the GIIHMA has engaged with, but remained strategically distanced from, traditional academic settings. They usually present their work in non-traditional book fairs and scenarios associated with Argentina’s working class.

Second, the GIIHMA has shattered the idea of the lone-wolf scholar who engages in research as a solitary process. They have decided to participate in their research endeavor in a collectivist manner, holding regular meetings, releasing position statements as a group entity, and refusing to appear in public activities as individual authors, but rather as a research community. This communal approach toward metal scholarship distances itself from many endeavors in North America and Europe, where the idea of the lonely scholar still permeates metal research and holds a certain level of allure.

Third, the GIIHMA has never lost sight of the social and political implications of heavy metal music in their country. Far from echoing the call to distance metal from politics, so frequently heard in the global north, they echo the working class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina and directly engage in political reflections. They have released position statements on issues related to homophobia, sexism, and the oppression of the working class, among many other social matters. This endeavor, as one might expect, has garnered them as many supporters as detractors. The GIIHMA has even gone so far as to call out important, and sometimes seemingly untouchable, figures in Argentina’s metal scene over what they understand to be racist and xenophobic positions. In summary, presenting this book without understanding the group that developed it would be a chimera; it would deprive it of its context, and therefore render it meaningless.

Another crucial factor that must be described in order to better understand the importance of this book is its context, specifically, some general characteristics of Argentina’s metal scene. Of course, we (Daniel and Nelson) describe this context from the perspective of outsiders, which in this case we understand is a great benefit as it allows us to explain how that scene is perceived from outside the country. Although some of our research has allowed us to know the scene from the inside (Varas-Díaz, Rivera-Segarra and Nevárez 2019), this dual positioning helps us place the book in its context.

Argentina’s metal scene has always been ahead of its time. Take, for example, the release of the album entitled Luchando por el Metal (Fighting for Metal) by legendary local band V8. The album was released in 1983, the same year Metallica released their album Kill em’ All in the United States. Although we feel somewhat uneasy with this comparison as it positions a band in the global north as the standard to follow, we are also aware of the impact this album had in the metal community in that particular year. Argentina had its own important release that year in parallel with what would become the genre’s most commercially successful band. Few people seem to put these two facts together, but when it is done, it speaks to how advanced Argentina’s metal scene was at the time. Although the global north would become familiar with Latin American metal music mostly through Sepultura’s album Beneath the Remains in 1989, bands like V8 were ahead of the game. They had created a locally influential album even before the Brazilians had released the albums Morbid Visions in 1986 or Schizophrenia in 1987. In summary, while the world was becoming familiar with Latin American metal through the lens of Brazil, Argentinians already had their local heroes.

The Argentinian scene, while being ahead of its time, seemed to be self-contained. Some of its most important artists have rarely left Argentina, or have simply toured in neighboring countries. Seminal bands like Almafuerte would still be large draws in the local concert circuit despite never playing on US or European soil. This characteristic, which could be explained by the massive geographical distance from metal epicenters worldwide, would yield a self-contained scene with a rabid fan base in which music and Argentinian nationalism would seamlessly mingle. Although the Argentinian scene would remain a relative secret for the metal industry in the global north, the experience would be very different for its neighboring countries in the global south, particularly Latin America. Any scholar, or metal fan for that matter, who has traveled through the region will attest to the respect the Argentinian scene has in Latin America due to its longevity and the number of active bands.

The two themes described above, the book’s authors and the characteristics of the local metal scene under study, set this book apart from other scholarly endeavors in metal music studies. It has been developed in a collective manner and through constant group discussion, thus challenging traditional academic work based on the singular opinions of authors or less-than-dialogically edited collections. It is also written from the perspective of authors who see metal as a genre beyond entertainment, helping readers understand its potential for social change. Finally, since it is written about a metal scene that is mostly ignored by metal scholarship and the international music industry, it opens a window into what metal does in one corner of the global south. These issues, even if sometimes inadvertent, serve as an important challenge to metal scholarship in the global north.

The Global South Blind Spot in Metal Studies

Research on heavy metal in the global south has increased exponentially in the past decade. Published articles and books about metal scenes in places like Nepal (Green 2012), Israel (Kahn-Harris 2012), Japan (Kawano and Hosokawa 2012), Malta (Bell 2012), Turkey (Hecker 2012), South Africa (Hoad 2014), Egypt (LeVine 2008), Puerto Rico (Varas-Díaz, Mendoza, Rivera, and González 2016), Cuba (Varas-Díaz, González-Sepúlveda, and Rivera Amador 2018), the Dominican Republic (Mendoza, Varas-Díaz, Rivera-Segarra and Vélez 2018), and Brazil (Dos Santos Silva 2018) evidence that metal is a global phenomenon (Jeremy Wallach, Berger and Greene 2012) and scholars have taken notice. Still, blind spots continue to show that some areas of the world have received more attention than others. Latin America, for example, has remained ignored in book collections that have aimed to propose a global approach to the musical genre, neglecting to include the region in a representative manner (Turner 2018). We understand this omission happens due to several reasons.

One of the main reasons for the omission of Latin America in metal music studies is language. The scholarly work being developed in the region has been published mostly in Spanish or Portuguese as it emerges from theses and dissertations carried out by young students as part of their higher education studies. These efforts are developed in their native languages and, when published in regional journals, fail to make their entrance into the scholarly databases and conference discussions in which metal scholarship is mostly consumed, specifically, the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, academic journals in which metal scholarship is published in the global north and the conferences in which it is discussed have done little to address this language gap and remain focused on English as the main language of exchange. A notable exception has been a special issue on Latin America metal published in the journal Metal Music Studies from UK publishing company Intellect. The issue was edited by Claudia Azevedo, Daniel Nevárez and myself, and included articles in Spanish and Portuguese, accompanied by their English translations (Varas-Díaz, Azevedo, and Nevárez 2018). This book, originally published in Spanish, later translated by Juan Manuel López Baio, and now fully revised and edited by us, is another effort to address this language gap.

A second reason for the omission of Latin America in metal music studies is of an economic nature; we are, of course, speaking specifically about poverty. Many of the students and scholars that engage in research in the region do so despite an extreme lack of funding for their endeavors. This becomes further complicated when their research reaches a stage of dissemination, which usually happens through academic conferences. These events are almost exclusively held in the global north and the implications of travel for these emerging scholars are nefarious. The exchange rate between their local currency and that of the US dollar or the Euro, to take two examples, make it almost impossible for them to take part in these events. Thus, research findings remain limited to small local events and have a hard time reaching a global audience. Therefore, they are rarely cited in the metal literature of the global north, and thus, render these efforts almost inexistent for other scholars.

These two issues, the use of local language and lack of economic resources, seem to foster the existing blind spot toward metal scholarship in the global south and Latin America in particular. Nevertheless, they must be understood as part of a larger problem ailing research on a global scale, specifically, academic imperialism. This position fosters the notion, sometimes explicitly and at other times tacitly, that knowledge production is limited to the global north and its university-affiliated individuals. Therefore, it is mostly shared and consumed in the global north. Take for example the biannual conferences of the International Society for Metal Studies (ISMMS), of which both Daniel and I are members. The first four conferences, arguably the most important events for metal scholarship in the world, have all taken place in the United States and Europe. ISMMS’ 2021 conference will take place in Mexico, after a growing number of scholars from the region have slowly influenced the decision-making process within the organization. These decisions are frequently implemented without malice or an explicit desire to silence research in the global south. Still, these practices can sometimes amount to academic imperialism and the tacit devaluation of knowledge produced in the global south. It is a great boon that organizations like ISMMS are willing to shift gears and engage the global